FINISHED DMS V2 M12 SYSTEM LOAD DECK INCLUDING MANGLED EDGE CARDS
Two of the boxes were the system load plus sample programs in Fortran, RPG, Cobol Assembler plus a few utilities. The sections where the edges near column 1 were torn up gave me the most difficulty, but I was finally able to coax them through and verify the results.
When a box is particularly troublesome I have to move to small batches, 20 to 35 cards apiece, which means I end up with very many of these small deck files to consolidate. I whipped up a python script to pull them together on my PC.
A box of programs from the COMMON user group was also among the work I accomplished today. The work is just begun when I finish reading, as I have to figure out what each deck accomplishes, document it and test it as much as possible. With as many boxes as I read today, I wasn't able to finish all that back end work by the end of the evening.
I did find the program that produces music on a nearby radio held near the processor, the complement to the decks of music data I had previously archived. Similarly, I had found a nude woman on stool printer art program which called a mystery program wxyz to print the stool itself. Today I found and archived that program, which completes the printer art work.
I then began on another reload deck for DMS V2 M12, archiving about 1/3 of a box before I left the workshop. These have intact edges but don't slide smoothly apart so that I have a medium rate of misreads and verification errors.
TESTING OF THE INTERNAL CONTROLLER ON THE M1000 DOCUMATION READER
I powered up and connected to the controller from my laptop. The connection was successful and it appears to reflect the machine status accurately, although I didn't force very combination of states. The pushbutton toggles the EOF lamp on. Finally, the controller code issues a pick command and drives the reader to move cards through the machine.
However, no data is transmitted to the PC. Tomorrow I need to monitor the IM line to see if the index marker pulses are arriving which is what triggers the Arduino to capture the hole patterns for each column. This could be wiring, bent pins on the shield, or another defect in the card reader electronics, to be resolved as I test the IM line.
Could you build in a "read backward" or "read upside down" ability in the software? what is the leading edge in the card reader?
ReplyDeleteHi Bob
DeleteThe leading edge is the side near column 1. I could certainly whip up some python to flip a card upside down, end to end or rotate it 180 degrees.
In the case of my chewed up cards, the trailing edges were even worse, but in general that is possible.
Could you build in a "read backward" or "read upside down" ability in the software? what is the leading edge in the card reader?
ReplyDeleteI used to help with the public demos of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Sydney) 1130 back in the late 70's we had that program that played music on a radio
ReplyDeleteI havnen't run it on the 1130 but have heard version for the 1401 and Xerox mainframes. How did it sound?
DeleteIt was just recognizable as music with a lot of background static. For public demos we mostly used software written by the Australian Burea of Meteorology for drawing weather maps (they were the 'owner' of the 1130 before IBM passed it to the Museum). We had a vector display with light pen and a box of buttons and a plotter as well as card reader and punch, I'm told there were two tape drives for it as well but no room for them in the display. Between public demos they let us nerdy high school kids run fortran programs and sometimes we would boot up the APL interpreter. You could actually do APL on cards, we had a hand punch and you had to hit 3 keys at once to do APL characters.
DeleteYour system had quite a nice set of peripherals - the 2250 graphics terminal, 1627 plotter, 2400 tape drives and the APL typeball for the console.
DeleteIt is possible to multipunch on an 029 keypunch to create the same mix of holes that you were doing on the hand punch (001 or Wrightline). Did they have a special print chain for the 1403 printer to render the APL characters for listings?
I am intrigued by the card based APL entry - will have to think about how to modify the APL system to take input from cards then give it a try.
Like musical static.
ReplyDelete