I had a couple of Disk-A-Tape units from a CNC systems that were controlled by a PDP-11/04s. They appear to have RS-232 I/O and a parallel port that emulates a paper tape reader. I don't know if the parallel port handles input too so that data can be saved to disk or if they output only. They have a 360k floppy drive in them and used it for storage but looked like a paper tape reader to the rest of the system. There's a calcualtor like display and keypad on the front that I'm guessing allows the operator to select the block of data to be used. They look interesting and I've fired them up and they appear to work but I have no idea how to connect or operate them so I gutted all of them except one for parts.
Joe
At 09:07 AM 7/20/02 -0700, Sellam wrote:
>On Sat, 20 Jul 2002, Tony Duell wrote:
>
>> > Still plugging away of a TTL style cpu in a FPGA I have found some terminals
>> > localy. How ever I am still looking for a serial RS232 mass storage device
>> > in Canada that is not tacky looking like a old Pee-Cee. For now I am using a
>>
>> There have been paper tape punches/readers, digital tape drives and even
>> disk drives with RS232 interfaces. But most of them didn't have any form
>> of block addressing -- they just saved data to replay it later. Would
>> that be any use?
>
>This reminds me (for no stringently particular reason) that I have an
>interesting Anderson-Jacobsen ASR terminal that has a disk drive instead
>of paper tape for storing the data stream.
>
>This is only slightly more interesting than the TI Silent 700 Model 733's
>I have that use digital cassette tapes.
>
>http://siconic.com/computers/ASR733-1.jpg
>
>I've actually played around with them quite a bit by way of a data
>recovery job I did. Very neat machines. They store data in something
>like 66 byte chunks. The tape drive actually advances in discrete steps
>that you can observe. It writes start and end marks for each block, and
>also has an ASCII search capability.
>
>Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org
>
> * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *
>
>
Received on Sun Jul 21 2002 - 07:37:20 BST
