<html><head></head><body style="zoom: 0%;"><div dir="auto">Any good simulation would have to include the semi-real I/O instructions RCC (Read and Chew Card) and DPD (Drop and Pie Deck).<br><br></div>
<div dir="auto">I'm with you about never again struggling to remove a card from the read gate that had been converted to a mini-accordion or measuring the size of a progrram in boxes, not bytes.<br><br></div>
<div dir="auto">I'm traveling for several weeks, but when back home I will assist Ken in getting an SDS driver for the reader/punch if he hasn't completed the task by then. All needed documentation is in the 940 Reference Manual.<br><br></div>
<div dir="auto">I wonder if anyone has sound recordings of a reader/punch? That would be a nice addition to a blinkenlights implementation, which is on my To Do list.<br><br></div>
<div dir="auto">Mark<br><br><br><br></div>
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<div class="gmail_quote" >On Feb 13, 2020, at 6:51 AM, Bob Supnik <<a href="mailto:bob@supnik.org" target="_blank">bob@supnik.org</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="blue">1. I can confirm that RT11 V5.3 INIT does not work properly with an RL02 <br>in 3.10.<br><br>My next step is to trace back changes, because I think it used to work.<br><br>2. There's no card reader for the SDS 940 because<br><br>a) I hate card readers (from having used them way back when)<br>b) I thought there wouldn't be any demand<br><br>Rich Cornwell's library should make it easier to implement a card reader<br>these days.<br><br>My first card reader story goes back to an RCA Spectra 70 I used in 1965.<br>It had a vacuum pick reader for high speed operation. The reader would<br>gradually curl the front edge of the cards, so that after two or three<br>passes, the deck was unreadable. It's failure mode was to spit cards out,<br>past the receive hopper, at very high velocity and scatter them ten or<br>fifteen feet out on the floor...<br><br>The second was a very slow mechanical reader on a PDP-7 in 1966. The<br>only other keyboard device was a Teletype, so initial entry of programs<br>was done from punched cards. It read, allegedly, 100 cards per minute<br>using mechanical fingers with little star wheels on the end. DEC field<br>service was in almost every week tuning or fixing the damned thing so<br>that it could actually handle a decent-sized deck.<br><br>In my experience, only IBM built decent card readers. The reader/punch<br>on the 1620 (I used one in 1964) was very sturdy, and the 407 (used for<br>offline printing of punched card output) could read almost anything.<br><br>/Bob<br><br><br><hr><br>Simh mailing list<br>Simh@trailing-edge.com<br><a href="http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh">http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh</a></pre></blockquote></div></body></html>