joev
Member
I'm playing around with SimH, simulating a small PDP-11 system with a high-speed paper tape reader, and I have a question about how the real hardware worked.
Real paper tapes have a blank leader section for a few inches so the operator can mount the tape and pull a few inches through, so it will re-fold itself properly as it's read. After a tape is mounted like this, does reading the tape return a series of zero bytes until the first "real" data byte is read? Or is there something about the tape or reader that can tell where the first real byte is?
Real paper tapes have a blank leader section for a few inches so the operator can mount the tape and pull a few inches through, so it will re-fold itself properly as it's read. After a tape is mounted like this, does reading the tape return a series of zero bytes until the first "real" data byte is read? Or is there something about the tape or reader that can tell where the first real byte is?