Friday, January 14, 2022

Wrapped up last of the cards and an interesting small challenge

FINISHED NURSING THE FINAL 1000 BADLY WARPED CARDS THROUGH ARCHIVING

With patience and skill, the remaining cards made it through the read, twice, to be archived to disk files and verified for correct capture. Over the coming week or two I will dig through all the files I captured, arrange them into logical files, combine sections that were spread across different boxes, test then where possible and document them. 

EXAMINING VARIOUS CARD FILES ON PC WHEN I DISCOVERED AN ODD SECTION

As I looked through the files I captured of the Commercial Subroutines for the 1130, I spotted a section of cards whose interpreted text was gibberish. As I looked at them, though, I could see areas that were likely to be the card sequencing (columns 73 to 80) but not representing real characters in Hollerith. Then, noticing a clustering of multipunched columns where one of the bottom three rows (7 to 9) were combined with higher row punches, I concluded that these cards were upside down!.

The cards were inserted in the deck with row 12 at the bottom and row 9 at the top, the reverse of a normal card. Some were also flipped side to side, so that column 80 was on the left and column 1 on the right. I had a few choices - ignore this and throw away the card images, dig through the boxes to find and reread those cards, or manipulate the files to flip and reverse the cards.

I chose the latter, whipped up some python code, and processed the cards. What I discovered were various // JOB cards, some disk utility program (DUP) commands such as store and list cards, and other odd cards that were NOT any program source or object code. I put these at the end of the Commercial Subroutines deck file for the time being, but they aren't very important. 


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