Teletype or Facit 4070

[Andrew Mawson]

Anyone know of a Teletype or a Facit 4070 paper tape punch gathering dust and needing re-homing?

Yes I need to punch some paper tape !!

AWEM

[Roger Mills]

Blimey - that takes me back a few decades! Must have been in the 1970's that I last used punched paper tape. We had a manual punch for computer cards, but I don't remember ever seeing one for paper tape - the tapes were invariably punched by the computer.

In those days, if the tape contained ASCII data, I could hold it up to the light and tell you what it said.

What are you using it for?

[Andrew Mawson]

Well I'm not unless I can find one !!!!!

Backing up parameters in a Fanuc 6M control used in a 1985 Fanuc Tape Cut Model M wire EDM machine that happens to be sitting in my garage and being polished!! Parameters are held in Bubble Memory (remember that?) which I need to remove.

AWEM

[Paul D Smith]

Tried the Science Museum or the computer dept. of the nearest well-established Uni? You might find an enthusiastic nerd only too happy to try getting ye olde hardware working again. Would make a good YouTube video seeing it run!

20+ years ago I could have had a go myself as my lab. had a PDP-11 and we still had a paper tape system, not that we used it in the 4 years I was there.

Paul DS.

[Huge]

Me too.

We edited all our source on ASR-33s;

also had a manual punch which looked like this;

Me too, although slowly. The girls in the punch room could read it as fast as written English.

I wonder what I did with all my tapes of line printer pictures?

[Huge]

Or better still, these people;

[Dave Liquorice]

How many bits? I can do(*) 5 bit as per telex machines. I am *NOT* parting company with my Creed 444.

(*) Well the machine hasn't been powered up for rather a long time but unless the grease/oil has solidified it should work provided the

80-0-80v PSU stilll does. B-)

[Bill]

group. I was over there a couple of weeks back and I'm sure one of the guys had leather patches on the elbows of his jumper.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Huge writes

while ago but they weren't interested. No interest on Ebay, and got some muppet asking whether it spoke Bell 103 or V21 (!)

Still have the blasted thing as I can't bring myself to throw it out.

[Huge]

I donated all my old computer kit to them a couple of years ago.

[Huge]

They took all my stuff. (Several Beebs, a PDP-11/23+, a Sinclair ZX80, couple of early Sun SPARCstations, couple of Xerox 820s and a VT100, along with software and manuals for all of it.)

[Brian Gaff]

Has nobody ever designed an interface to more recent gear, after all the data might have had to be taken out at some point. I find it hard to believe nobody else has tried this. Brian

[Andrew Mawson]

Well that's more replies than I expected!!!

a/ Bletchley Park ... sshh I used to work there! b/ Leather Patches on elbows - what's wrong with that - very 'green' ! c/ Mikes acoustic coupler - I had a very similar one that I wound up to 300 baud - great improvement on 110 from a Teletype d/ Four years ago I gave away a KSR33 with only 7.5 hours on the clock -it went to a west country museum - forgotten where exactly e/ 8 bit tape I'm afraid f/ Yes there are devices called 'BTRs - Behind the Tape Reader' that emulate the readers signals for input. One on the US ebay at the moment but £500 !The Fanuc 6M is a bit odd in it's firmware in that although there is an RS232 port that is bi-directional, using it it can only load program memory up to it's full capacity (documented in feet of paper tape) then execute it when loaded, whereas the tape reader can read a theoretical infinite amount of data which gets executed as it is read - this is necessary for large chunks of code generated by modern CAM software.

AWEM

[David WE Roberts]

Try

they don't have it, then they may know where to get one.

If you chance across the Resurrection Bulletin Editor then mention my name and no doubt you will be roundly insulted ;-)

Cheers

Dave R

[Andrew Mawson]

Thanks for that link, the next meeting sounds very interesting:

The Ferranti Argus Process Control Computer in London Thu 16th Feb @ 14:00

As I happened to work for Ferranti in London for 25 years on Argus Process Control Computers !!!!

AWEM

[Steve Firth]

Huge wrote: [snip]

There's one in a glass case, about two floors down from where I am working.

Me too, then we upgraded to Olivettis then Newbury terminals with "massive"

4kB of RAM.

[Nthkentman]

You might ask here and see if it leads you anywhere useful

[David WE Roberts]

My background was in programming and system support of ICL System 4, 2900 VME/B, then 296x DME 1900 emulation. A very rare move back from hexadecimal to octal - it took us a while to work out where 8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F had all gone :-)

Then they invented the IBM PC...........

[Bob Eager]

It's a pain that the meetings are on Thursdays....it's the one day I

*have* to be at work! I keep missing good stuff.

Remember seeing a couple of Arguses back in 1974, at the CEGB control centre in London.

[Bob Eager]

LOL!

Never used VME/B, but suffered VME/K for three years until we dumped it in favour of something more functional and reliable. Our 2960 wasn't up to running VME/B.