Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/07/07/20:30:27
atbowler AT thinkage DOT on DOT ca (Alan Bowler) told us
> In article <35A13F08 DOT 23950102 AT tnglwood DOT demon DOT co DOT uk> Robert Billing <unclebob AT tnglwood DOT demon DOT co DOT uk> writes:
> >Alan Bowler wrote:
> >
> >> to start the paper tape reader going, and the reader would stop
> >> when it read the next X-OFF. Alternately, the machine use a timeout
> >> mechanism to decide when there was no more paper tape.
> >
> > The timeout on no tape I don't remember, the ASR33 simply had a plastic
> >peg that popped up and killed the reader at end of tape.
>
> The timeout I referred to was not on the TTY. It was used on
> operating systems that had a "paper input mode". The program issued
> some sort of "read paper tape input" command, and the OS would put
> the line in paper tape mode, it often came out of this mode based on
> a timeout of some sort (tape ran out so no more characters arrived),
> and then the program would process all the data received.
> Often the OS looked after collecting the data to disk in some
> raw fashion during paper tape mode.
I remember this from a PDP11 I worked at. Normally we'd use
floppies and copy to harddisk, but for older things it had an
optical high-speed papertape tear^H^H^H^Hreader that would stop
automatically a second or so after it had torn your papertape in
two.
I don't know if it was the reader by itself, or the OS that made
it stop.
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