Ok, being that CA1 on my rig is definitely screwy, I moved the ERROR
signal (which hardly, if ever, gets triggered) over to it and moved the
Index Mark signal to CA2 (which is triggering reliably), fixed some bugs,
and I got one whole card read in!
The data was almost complete with some NULLs in the data. It turns out my
decoding routine was not properly decoding row 9. I fixed that and voila,
one (misinterpreted) FORTRAN code line!
I am using the IBM EBCDIC character table right now which is why I say
"misinterpreted". I just need to fix it to the classic FORTRAN character
set and that's it.
The way I designed this, I have a table that contains the characters for
the cards being read. You either have to know what character set the
cards are using or figure it out somehow, then load that character table
into the character space so the cards decode properly.
The last step will be to shoot the data out the serial port and I'll have
myself one punch card to serial data converter.
Thanks VERY, VERY much to all who helped, especially Mr. Lawson, Mr.
Duell, and Mr. Dunnington. Thanks also to Mr. McConnell for linking me
up with Doug Jones' punch card information, which was especially
invaluable. And of course, special thanks to David Gesswein for providing
the documenation which I used extensively throughout this project. It'll
be nice to get an original manual for the reader eventually (anyone have
a copy they're willing to part with? :)
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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International Man of Intrigue and Danger
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Received on Fri Jan 03 2003 - 01:16:01 GMT