At 03:49 PM 5/25/00 -0400, you wrote:
>>From the "just out of curiosity" department...
>
>What is the punch format used for a paper tape that would be used on an
>Altair or IMSAI? Is it straight binary or something like the Intel Hex
>format?
>
>The reason why I'm asking is because I'm toying with adding a virtual paper
>tape punch/reader to Claus Guiloi's IMSAI emulator.
Well... for my $0.225 worth (inflation you know)...
I doubt that there is a real answer for that one, unless you select a
particular operating 'model' for focus on.
By that I mean, that since neither the Altair or IMSAI had a resident
monitor program or 'native' operating system at first, there were no hard
and fast rules as to what/how you would load code...
By way of example:
Altair paper tapes were loaded by a keyed in bootstrap routine, which
pulled a loader from the paper tape which read the MITS checksummed binary
format.
IMSAI's paper tapes early on had a keyed in loader, which read in a loader,
which read Intel HEX format tapes.
Motorola also had a variation on the Intel HEX format which TDL was fond of
IIRC, and they produced tapes marketed into the Altair / IMSAI market.
Throw CP/M into the mix, and the 'RDR/PUN' devices were raw binary unless
they were selected by a loader program, although ASM and MAC could
read/write Intel HEX I believe. (where IS that manual...???)
Cromemco published their paper tape distributions in a mix of Intel HEX,
binary, and Tokenized CROMEMCO BASIC.
Processor Technology was largely Intel HEX I think...
A lot of third party utility/game/'business' (and I use the phrase lightly)
were straight ASCII dumps from Microsoft (sigh) BASIC...
... Tough question, eh?
-jim
---
jimw_at_computergarage.org
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Received on Thu May 25 2000 - 23:17:57 BST