Ticker tape program

[DrCharles]

Over on Greenkeys I saw the following recently:
-------------------------
Hello friends,

Does anyone know of a program (maybe one I can run on a PC) that will take
an ASCII string of characters and output a series of 8-bit bytes that when
sent to a tape punch, will create human readable characters on the tape? A
single ASCII character would typically require several bytes to form the
character. I guess it might be called a "Banner Program" or something like
that. Anyone know of something?

Thanks

73 Eugene W2HX
--------------------------

So that inspired me to write and debug today a little program in PDP-8 assembly language to print ticker-tape, just for the mental exercise. Debugging took a lot longer than it should have, but I haven't written any assembly language in quite a few years, and far longer since doing any PDP-8 assembly! Only handles 0-9 and A-Z for the moment, and that was enough tedium entering the font one character at a time! Fortunately those are available in DECUS FOCAL8-87 although crude (5x6 matrix).

Unfortunately at the moment I have no good way of getting it out of my PDP-8/A so someone else can have a copy (and hopefully improve it). I have to get back to work on Dumprest, but to do that I need to rebuild the cloned Programmer's Panel board as mentioned in another thread.

Not only that, after numerous feet of paper tape had passed through my 33's punch, it started to punch a hole here and there that it's not being commanded to do... looks like TV static "snow" Time for some more lubrication/tinkering with the punch, I guess!

AND that #$%^ power supply problem came back after running for several hours, despite replacing the old 110,000 uf filter cap for the +5 supply that I'd thought was the problem with a newer 180,000 uf Mallory that fits in the chassis. This time I thought I saw the desk lamp flicker a bit out of the corner of my eye, so maybe it's the AC line too... need to check the outlet itself, for starters.

-Charles

 

[jackrubin]

yep - there's a hole in the bucket ...

 

[DrCharles]

The bit bucket maybe... fortunately not the chad bucket. Have you ever tried to get that oily chad out of your hair, or off your school clothes? DAMHIK :D

 

[DDS]

The bit bucket maybe... fortunately not the chad bucket. Have you ever tried to get that oily chad out of your hair, or off your school clothes? DAMHIK :D

Here in Florida we've had our fill of chads. World famous chads. Supreme Court chads. Hanging chads. Dimpled chads. Pregnant chads.

;-)

 

[bgardner8008]

Way back in 1977 when I was in high school, Jim Larus and I wrote a program to do this, called Tickertape. It was written in BASIC for the PDP8, and we got the program published in Creative Computing, vol 3, no. 3. There were a couple of challenges to overcome. First there was no statement to convert ASCII char to an integer to do the font lookup, but BASIC didn't complain if you simply assigned a char to a number. You got a wacky number though due to float representation. Jim figured out a formula to do the proper conversion. The other challenge was memory. If memory serves, our PDP8 had 8K (or was it 4k?). Half the core was used for BASIC, and the remaining half was split into 4 user partitions, so the programs had to be really compact. So much fun!

 

[bobaboba]

There must have been a few of these programs around over time. Mid-70s I remember writing one in assembler that I used to punch a readable title and date on the front end of the backup tapes I dumped.