Monday, November 23, 2015

Read in 1130 application deck, continued work on system load process

SYSTEM INIT DECK AND CARTRIDGE RECREATION

I worked on my utility program, painstakingly comparing the cards produced by my program to the cards from the assembly that created the original source disk cartridge. Still not going all the way through the system load process.

READING AND SAVING APP PROGRAM DECK FOR SOMEONE

A person donating an application program to the Computer History Museum wanted it read and an electronic copy sent to him, so I volunteered. It was exactly 1,866 cards which I fed through the Documation reader and converted to IBM 1130 simulator format, verifying each section after reading to eliminate any misread cards.

I have two Documation readers, model 600 and model 1000, but I have only made my hardware modification to the first one. This mod allows cards with the triangular 'cuts' on either the right or left sides to be read correctly. As built by Documation, the reader will get read checks on many cards with a triangle cut on the right side.

It seems that either my reader or my interface to the PC is balky, so that after running through 500 or so cards, it starts getting into wedged states that require me to reset. If I give the gear about 30 minutes to cool down, I can get it back to reading solidly for the next 500 or 600 cards. It wasn't too long until I had them all read in and was ready to do some deck processing.

The decks are split into separate decks, each one job - 21 subroutines, one list of error messages and two mainlines with sample data. Next up was to test these on the 1130 simulator to verify they all compile clean and perform reasonable things when run, after which I can send them to the donor.

All the decks compiled fine, but the two main programs made use of some subroutines that were not on the 1130 simulator system and not included in his deck. AMAX1, AMIN1, MOD, IDIF, RFRMT and the like. The first three should have come with a cartridge intended for a FORTRAN system, 

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