Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Brian Walden]

> Papertape reader?

The last Cyphercon had a paper tape reader in their badge --

https://hackaday.com/2019/04/12/cyphercon-badge-has-a-paper-tape-reader-built-in/

You can proably buy one from the con https://cyphercon.com/, or the makers
http://www.tymkrs.com/ or ebay...

-Brian

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Jon Steinhart]

Brian Walden writes:
> > Papertape reader?
>
> The last Cyphercon had a paper tape reader in their badge --
>
> https://hackaday.com/2019/04/12/cyphercon-badge-has-a-paper-tape-reader-built-in/
>
> You can proably buy one from the con https://cyphercon.com/, or the makers
> http://www.tymkrs.com/ or ebay...
>
> -Brian

That's cool, but I'm worried about the fragility of the tape after all this time.
Maybe because I got my start in the early networking era when I had to transfer
files from one machine to another by feeding the paper tape from the punch in one
ASR-33 into the reader of another :-)

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Bakul Shah]

On Tue, 14 Jan 2020 20:01:11 -0800 Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
>
> That's cool, but I'm worried about the fragility of the tape after all this
> time.

I thought paper tape lasted much longer that magtapes....

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Brian Walden wrote:
>> Papertape reader?
> The last Cyphercon had a paper tape reader in their badge --
> https://hackaday.com/2019/04/12/cyphercon-badge-has-a-paper-tape-reader-built-in/

I'd be all over this if there also were a way to punch tapes.

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Earl Baugh]

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Why not build a variation of this with an Arduino?
 https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/. You could use cardboard rather than wood if it’s just a one time job. ( or scan the tape into files and process digitally ?) 

Earl 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 15, 2020, at 1:18 AM, Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:
> 
> Brian Walden wrote:
>>> Papertape reader?
>> The last Cyphercon had a paper tape reader in their badge --
>> https://hackaday.com/2019/04/12/cyphercon-badge-has-a-paper-tape-reader-built-in/
> 
> I'd be all over this if there also were a way to punch tapes.

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Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

[Jon Steinhart]

Earl Baugh writes:
> Why not build a variation of this with an Arduino?
>  https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/.
> You could use cardboard rather than wood if it’s just a one time job. ( or scan
> the tape into files and process digitally ?) 
> 
> Earl 

I thought that I said earlier that I had a paper tape reader here but don't
remember much about it or if it ever worked.  If I didn't have a huge project
list and it wasn't ski season I could hook it up to a pi.  More likely that
I'll get to a computer museum sooner.

Just to keep this UNIX-related so that Warren doesn't get cranky, I believe
that this reader came out of some sort of experimental telephone exchange
in our group that was decommissioned.  Dave Weller was very supportive of my
interests and somehow arranged for me to take much of it home as surplus
equipment.  Kept me in 7400-series parts and Augat wire-wrap boards for a
long time.  While there was no way that I could have kept the thing, I wish
that I had the magnetic drum memory because it was so cool from an industrial
art perspective.

Heinz may remember more about this than I do because he actually worked on
this project, but our department developed what I believe was the first
all-digital telephone exchange that used digital filtering (Hal Alles and
Jim Kaiser were in the group).  I think that it had a pair of PDP-11/10s
in it, and a bigger PDP-11 as a supervisory machine that ran UNIX.  I have
vague memories of Heinz and Carl poring over huge C program listings.  I
also remember that there was a bug in the long-distance code where it wasn't
sending out the ST tone that ended up taking all of the key pulse senders in
the Berkeley Heights telephone exchange that provided the trunk line to our
lab off line as they didn't have timeouts and needed to be manually reset.
But hey, we were the phone company too so what could they do about it?

Oh, I think that the PDP-11/10s were used because we tried to use LSI-11s
but those turned out to be useless because of the way that DEC did the DRAM
refresh; it wasn't interleaved, they just stopped everything every so many
ms and refreshed everything.  Non-starter for real-time systems.

And another thought, this machine may have been why Heinz wrote MERT.

I was gone before this system was completed so I have no idea how it fared
and how many of the ideas were incorporated into production systems.  Oh,
yeah, I think that it was called the SS1 for Slave Switch 1.

Jon

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

[Earl Baugh]

I thought the concern was about the fragility of the tape and the concern about running it thru a period reader. I was just thinking these two options would be safer on the tape.  That’s why I was suggesting them.  Just trying to be helpful .. all to familiar with the long project list :-) 

Earl 


Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 15, 2020, at 2:12 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> Earl Baugh writes:
>> Why not build a variation of this with an Arduino?
>> https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/.
>> You could use cardboard rather than wood if it’s just a one time job. ( or scan
>> the tape into files and process digitally ?) 
>> 
>> Earl 
> 
> I thought that I said earlier that I had a paper tape reader here but don't
> remember much about it or if it ever worked.  If I didn't have a huge project
> list and it wasn't ski season I could hook it up to a pi.  More likely that
> I'll get to a computer museum sooner.
> 
> Just to keep this UNIX-related so that Warren doesn't get cranky, I believe
> that this reader came out of some sort of experimental telephone exchange
> in our group that was decommissioned.  Dave Weller was very supportive of my
> interests and somehow arranged for me to take much of it home as surplus
> equipment.  Kept me in 7400-series parts and Augat wire-wrap boards for a
> long time.  While there was no way that I could have kept the thing, I wish
> that I had the magnetic drum memory because it was so cool from an industrial
> art perspective.
> 
> Heinz may remember more about this than I do because he actually worked on
> this project, but our department developed what I believe was the first
> all-digital telephone exchange that used digital filtering (Hal Alles and
> Jim Kaiser were in the group).  I think that it had a pair of PDP-11/10s
> in it, and a bigger PDP-11 as a supervisory machine that ran UNIX.  I have
> vague memories of Heinz and Carl poring over huge C program listings.  I
> also remember that there was a bug in the long-distance code where it wasn't
> sending out the ST tone that ended up taking all of the key pulse senders in
> the Berkeley Heights telephone exchange that provided the trunk line to our
> lab off line as they didn't have timeouts and needed to be manually reset.
> But hey, we were the phone company too so what could they do about it?
> 
> Oh, I think that the PDP-11/10s were used because we tried to use LSI-11s
> but those turned out to be useless because of the way that DEC did the DRAM
> refresh; it wasn't interleaved, they just stopped everything every so many
> ms and refreshed everything.  Non-starter for real-time systems.
> 
> And another thought, this machine may have been why Heinz wrote MERT.
> 
> I was gone before this system was completed so I have no idea how it fared
> and how many of the ideas were incorporated into production systems.  Oh,
> yeah, I think that it was called the SS1 for Slave Switch 1.
> 
> Jon

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[John Foust]

At 12:34 AM 1/15/2020, Earl Baugh wrote:
>Why not build a variation of this with an Arduino?
> <https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/>https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/. You could use cardboard rather than wood if it’s just a one time job. ( or scan the tape into files and process digitally ?) 

We're so close, I wish someone would figure out a way to let
a contemporary office scanner like the Fujitsu ScanSnap to
handle paper tapes.  Reliable feed mechanism, nice scanner,
just needs a little software and maybe a guide.  And a way
to re-spool the tape.  Darn, just got complicated.  

Same thing for a new way to read a magtape.  You'd think it 
could be done with a universal read head and some software.

Nine years ago I visited <http://www.comco-inc.com/>http://www.comco-inc.com/ , perhaps
one of the last sellers and refurbishers of 9-tracks.  I dropped
off three 9-tracks I didn't need.  He seems to be surviving 
because oil survey companies still call and are willing to 
write five-figure checks for particular working hardware.

- John

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 2:12 AM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:

> we tried to use LSI-11s
> but those turned out to be useless because of the way that DEC did the DRAM
> refresh; it wasn't interleaved, they just stopped everything every so many
> ms and refreshed everything.  Non-starter for real-time systems.
>
Be careful as to who you denigrate, my friend. 😂

Very interesting history, IMO.    Yes, DEC sold the LSI-11, but Western
Digital designed it.  DEC (KO specifically) had just put Ray Ball and Ken
O'humundro's CalData out of business for cloning the PDP-11/45 with a
Unibus on his Caldata 500
<http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/calData/CalData_Brochures_1974.pdf>.   At the
time, WD had developed and started to sell to the systems manufacturers a
new set of bit-slice chips the MCP-1600
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCP-1600>, to compete with AMD's 2900 and
Intel 3000 series (plus they were already a chip supplier to DEC for UARTS).
   So WD designs and builds a few LSI-11 as a sales demo of what you could
do with their new bit-slice chip (*i.e. *as those things often go, the
board, bus, and memory was a quick and cheap hack).

It's important to note that the way DEC nailed CalData was the *same
instruction set on the same bus*, WD did their own bus for their demo.
Also, please remember that at the time, WD was in the chip business.   KO's
reaction this time was different.  Instead of suing, DEC got the design and
started to build and sell them.   WD took the board design, wrote a new set
of microcode based on the USCD Pascal-P machine
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal>, then sold that as a 'system'
called the Pascal MicroEngine
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_MicroEngine>, but primarily used it
is the sales demo.

I remember seeing one of the WD Pascal-P systems once when we were at Tek
(along with my favorite named workstation, the Modula based Lilith
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith_(computer)>).  But I do not think the
Pascal-P (nor Lilith) was very successful.   Also, AMD ultimately won the
bit-slice chip business, as most designers at manufacturers like DEC,
Masscomp, FPS, *et al*. designed their new systems or at least the FP/AP
coprocessors with the 2900 series.

BTW: this is also why a few years later when Ken O'Humundro created another
full computer board with a 68000 on it with his new Able  Computer Corp, he
put it on the QBUS which DEC could not lock up because they did not create
it as WD had.

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Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

[Al Kossow]

On 1/15/20 6:50 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
> WD took the board design, wrote a
> new set of microcode based on the USCD Pascal-P machine <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal>, then sold that as a
> 'system' called the Pascal MicroEngine <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_MicroEngine>, but primarily used it is the
> sales demo.

And Volition Systems, took the P-System chip set and put it on the QBus, later put Modula-2 on it.

[TUHS] tape reading (was Re: Spacewar at Bell Labs)

[Al Kossow]

On 1/15/20 4:29 AM, John Foust wrote:

> Same thing for a new way to read a magtape.  You'd think it 
> could be done with a universal read head and some software.

It's been done. You need a good transport that has enough torque to deal with
sticky tapes and a digitizer with about 100gigs of ram if you're doing acquisition
with a Saleae Logic16 USB3 analyzer.

https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape

The setup is a couple thousand dollars.

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Al Kossow]

On 1/14/20 9:19 AM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Does anybody know if the
> Computer History Museum or equivalent has a DEC paper tape reader that
> works?

It does in my lab at CHM Fremont.
You near by?

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Jon Steinhart wrote:
>> Is the paper tape readable somehow?
> Does anybody know if the Computer History Museum or equivalent has a
> DEC paper tape reader that works?

I'm almost certain they do.  If you can get it to them, that's probably
the best option.  To people closer to Seattle I would recommend Living
Computers Museum.

> I could probably lay it out on a scanner but that would be tedious.
> Might actually be best, it's over 45 years old and probably fragile.

Having recently read some Whirwind paper tapes, I'm sure the CHM people
know how to handle old tapes.  Paper or otherwise.

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Clem Cole]

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I built a paper tape reader at one point, lord knows were it is. It's
pretty easy -- Two pieces of wood to hold the paper with a mm or 2 shaved
off the bottom of one of them the width of the paper tape. Then 9 parallel
holes and put optical transistors connected to a 5 volt supply via a series
resistor, running into a parallel port the 4th one is used as a strobe to
pick of the 8 data bits and small light bulb on the other piece of wood.
 You then just pull it through and its self strobing.   Set up a cat <
/dev/parallel > /tmp/foo
Your basically done, you'll need to pick reasonable values for the
resistors to that match your transistors to switch on/off if the light
passed through the hole.  I've forgotten what I used, it something I had in
the parts box.





On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 12:16 PM Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:

> Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > I have a copy of double-sun space war (sorry, just the binary) for the
> > PDP-15/GRIN-2 on DEC fan-fold paper tape with the boot loader written
> > in octal on the leader.  Not sure if it's of any use
>
> I'm very interested in this!  Is the paper tape readable somehow?
>

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Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Jon Steinhart]

Lars Brinkhoff writes:
> Jon Steinhart wrote:
> > I have a copy of double-sun space war (sorry, just the binary) for the
> > PDP-15/GRIN-2 on DEC fan-fold paper tape with the boot loader written
> > in octal on the leader.  Not sure if it's of any use
>
> I'm very interested in this!  Is the paper tape readable somehow?

Now that's an interesting question.  Being paper tape, it's from the days
in which you could see a bit with the naked eye.  Another industrial
artifact that I have somewhere is a paper tape reader, but it would take
time away from skiing to get it working.  Does anybody know if the
Computer History Museum or equivalent has a DEC paper tape reader that
works?  I could probably lay it out on a scanner but that would be
tedious.  Might actually be best, it's over 45 years old and probably
fragile.

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Jon Steinhart wrote:
> I have a copy of double-sun space war (sorry, just the binary) for the
> PDP-15/GRIN-2 on DEC fan-fold paper tape with the boot loader written
> in octal on the leader.  Not sure if it's of any use

I'm very interested in this!  Is the paper tape readable somehow?

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Jon Steinhart]

Lars Brinkhoff writes:
> Hello,
>
> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/spacetravel.html says:
>
> > Later we fixed Space Travel so it would run under (PDP-7) Unix instead
> > of standalone, and did also a very faithful copy of the Spacewar game
>
> I have a file with ".TITLE PDP-9/GRAPHIC II VERSION OF SPACEWAR".  (I
> hope it will go public soon.)  It seems to be a standalone program, and
> it's written in something close to MACRO-9 syntax.  I'm guessing the
> Bell Labs version would have been written using the Unix assembler.
>
> Best regards,
> Lars Brinkhoff

I have a copy of double-sun space war (sorry, just the binary) for the
PDP-15/GRIN-2 on DEC fan-fold paper tape with the boot loader written
in octal on the leader.  Not sure if it's of any use but it's a nice
historical artifact from the BTL explorer scout days.

Jon

[TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Hello,

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/spacetravel.html says:

> Later we fixed Space Travel so it would run under (PDP-7) Unix instead
> of standalone, and did also a very faithful copy of the Spacewar game

I have a file with ".TITLE PDP-9/GRAPHIC II VERSION OF SPACEWAR".  (I
hope it will go public soon.)  It seems to be a standalone program, and
it's written in something close to MACRO-9 syntax.  I'm guessing the
Bell Labs version would have been written using the Unix assembler.

Best regards,
Lars Brinkhoff