On 8/6/2021 12:21 PM, John Foust via cctalk wrote:
At 11:45 AM 8/6/2021, Jay Jaeger via cctalk wrote:
On 8/5/2021 2:57 PM, Len Shustek via cctalk wrote:
On Aug 5, 2021, at 8:39 AM, Jay Jaeger via cctech wrote:
I know Paul well (we were contemporaries at U. WI).
Where did Paul work at
On 8/6/21 11:37 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
>
> IBM 3490 - 36 track. The 3590 and later get silly numbers of tracks on
> half-inch tapes. Don't know if the 18-track 3480 was MR, however.
>
According to this report:
On 8/6/21 10:27 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>
> That was done by a number of people using MR (magneto-resistive) heads. John
> Bordynuik was one of them, years ago; some others have done likewise. Those
> heads were built by IBM for high density tape cartridges; 6250 is low density
>
> On Aug 6, 2021, at 1:21 PM, John Foust via cctalk
> wrote:
>
> At 11:45 AM 8/6/2021, Jay Jaeger via cctalk wrote:
>> On 8/5/2021 2:57 PM, Len Shustek via cctalk wrote:
On Aug 5, 2021, at 8:39 AM, Jay Jaeger via cctech
wrote:
I know Paul well (we were contemporaries at U.
At 11:45 AM 8/6/2021, Jay Jaeger via cctalk wrote:
>On 8/5/2021 2:57 PM, Len Shustek via cctalk wrote:
>> > On Aug 5, 2021, at 8:39 AM, Jay Jaeger via cctech
>> > wrote:
>> > I know Paul well (we were contemporaries at U. WI).
Where did Paul work at UW-Madison? I don't recall him. I was on
On 8/6/21 9:45 AM, Len via cctalk wrote:
Some years ago, inspired by Paul Pierce's earlier program in Java, I wrote similar software in C to decode the analog waveforms from tapes
in a variety of formats: 7-track NRZI, 9-track NRZI, PE, and 6250 BPI GCR, and 6-track NRZI for Whirlwind.
On 8/5/2021 2:57 PM, Len Shustek via cctalk wrote:
> On Aug 5, 2021, at 8:39 AM, Jay Jaeger via cctech
wrote:
> I know Paul well (we were contemporaries at U. WI). He does not do
that very often. He did not indicate any issue with a fire at the
building that contains his collection when I
> On Aug 5, 2021, at 3:57 PM, Len Shustek via cctalk
> wrote:
>
> > On Aug 5, 2021, at 8:39 AM, Jay Jaeger via cctech
> > wrote:
> > I know Paul well (we were contemporaries at U. WI). He does not do that
> > very often. He did not indicate any issue with a fire at the building that
>
> On Aug 5, 2021, at 8:39 AM, Jay Jaeger via cctech
wrote:
> I know Paul well (we were contemporaries at U. WI). He does not
do that very often. He did not indicate any issue with a fire at the
building that contains his collection when I last spoke with him.
>
> He does not actually read
On 8/5/21 12:04 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
> Does anything other than (real) DECtape arrange for an air cushion between
> tape and head? Would it be possible to tweak a tape drive -- streaming or
> otherwise -- to do that?
Dunno--probably not at 6250 GCR, htough.
> On Aug 5, 2021, at 2:55 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
> wrote:
>
> On 8/5/21 11:20 AM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
>> They have air bearing "hubs" that the tape wraps over, and nothing but
>> the tape head and cleaner blades touch the oxide side of the tape. But,
>> they can still suffer
On 8/5/21 11:20 AM, Jon Elson via cctalk wrote:
> They have air bearing "hubs" that the tape wraps over, and nothing but
> the tape head and cleaner blades touch the oxide side of the tape. But,
> they can still suffer from tape sticking to the heads.
...which is where the tape ends up sticking,
On 8/4/21 4:14 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
5) Forget using a streamer--they're just not suited to dealing with
fragile tape.
I may differ on this one. CDC Keystone (92181 and 92185)
drives are really gentle on tape.
They have air bearing "hubs" that the tape wraps over, and
nothing
On 8/5/21 8:23 AM, Jay Jaeger via cctech wrote:
>
> Also, before starting (after baking and cool-down) I unspool maybe 25
> feet of tape onto a clean surface to make sure it isn't sticking. If it
> does, I let it sit for a few hours, and then bake it again. Have not
> had to bake for additional
On 8/5/2021 9:28 AM, James Liu wrote:
On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 10:25 AM Jay Jaeger wrote:
Thanks, Jay (and others) for offering your assistance. I've asked
Chuck to have a look at the tape, and we'll see how it goes.
Great!
Given the name "IEBUPDTX" this tape was certainly intended to
Yeah, well, the first part is the hard part - setting it all up and
making recording. The second part is more or less trivial, once the
software was done.
One of the 1410 tapes had a persistent parity error - that one I was
able to figure out from knowledge of the machine, instruction set,
Some thoughts
On 8/4/2021 4:14 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctech wrote:
Whoever does it, I have a few suggestions when it comes to 40+ year old
tapes.
1) Bake the thing at 58C for a day or two. It might just prevent you
from staring at a tape stuck to the head and a pile of brown dust at the
bottom
On Wed, Aug 4, 2021 at 10:25 AM Jay Jaeger wrote:
>
> James, I am located in Madison WI. I would need to fire up my SCSI 9
> Track drive (software on Linux) and test it as I have not used in a
> couple of years, but I have done recovery of old tapes from this era
> before, and have a primitive
Perhaps the work could be split up: reading the track waveforms is the one step
that requires special hardware (and the skill to handle the tape with minimal
damage). Given a collection of recovered waveforms, the data recovery can then
be done by anyone.
paul
> On Aug 5, 2021, at
I know Paul well (we were contemporaries at U. WI). He does not do that
very often. He did not indicate any issue with a fire at the building
that contains his collection when I last spoke with him.
He does not actually read "blocks". He reads the tape in an *analog*
fashion, and then
Whoever does it, I have a few suggestions when it comes to 40+ year old
tapes.
1) Bake the thing at 58C for a day or two. It might just prevent you
from staring at a tape stuck to the head and a pile of brown dust at the
bottom of the drive. (Before you start, make note of the brand and type
of
Paul Pierce read some 7-track and 9-track tapes for
me about twenty years ago. He was in Portland, OR at the time. His
"lab" was on the east side of the Willamette river, so maybe it didn't
get burned down.
I don't know whether he still has a setup to read tapes. His software
would read blocks
James, I am located in Madison WI. I would need to fire up my SCSI 9
Track drive (software on Linux) and test it as I have not used in a
couple of years, but I have done recovery of old tapes from this era
before, and have a primitive setup for "baking" tapes before trying to
read them.
On 8/3/21 4:51 PM, Dave Wade G4UGM via cctalk wrote:
-Original Message-
From: cctalk On Behalf Of Dennis Boone
via cctalk
Sent: 03 August 2021 21:31
To: cctalk@classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Help reading a 9 track tape
> It was intended to be a stop-gap, to be discarded when the
> Well you could ask Silverfrost who now own it. I think a lot of Salford
> Pr1me software was lost.
Vague memory suggests that someone did, and that they don't have it any
more. When I asked Rob Jung, ex-Primate, if he still had the Prime
version of his ARJ compressor, he didn't have that
> -Original Message-
> From: cctalk On Behalf Of Dennis Boone
> via cctalk
> Sent: 03 August 2021 21:31
> To: cctalk@classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: Help reading a 9 track tape
>
> > It was intended to be a stop-gap, to be discarded when the ICL was >
&
On 8/3/21 1:12 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>
>
>> On Aug 3, 2021, at 3:28 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> One of my favorite 6000 bits of code was the register save and restore
>> routines (not using CEJ). It was a favorite interview question for
>> those job seekers claiming to be proficient
> It was intended to be a stop-gap, to be discarded when the ICL was
> replaced with PR1ME. However the PR1ME was benchmarked with Fortran 66.
> When Pr1me Fortran 77 was delivered its performance was "pants" so the
> "stop gap" ICL compiler was ported to PR1ME...
Wish we could find that
On 8/3/21 11:58 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
>
> Mostly true; some machines had the "compare-move unit" which would do what it
> says -- move or compare string of 6-bit characters". But nothing fancier.
I think the CMU arrived with the CYBER 7x line--I don't recall seeing a
6400 with one. Of
> On Aug 3, 2021, at 2:44 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
> wrote:
>
> On 8/3/21 9:46 AM, ben via cctalk wrote:
>
>> Hardware makes software interesting, or is it the other way around?
>> With C being developed on a PDP 11, you had no decimal operations,
>> but IBM had PL/I that did. Every thing
On 8/3/21 9:46 AM, ben via cctalk wrote:
> Hardware makes software interesting, or is it the other way around?
> With C being developed on a PDP 11, you had no decimal operations,
> but IBM had PL/I that did. Every thing was binary floating point
> since then, until the latest standard of
On 2021-08-02 5:07 p.m., Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
IS the specialty of the language WRITING COMPILERS? If not, it would
seem that a better compiler for that language would be written in a
language best suited for writing compilers (strong string/text handling
and parsing, suitable tree
From: cctalk on behalf of Stefan Skoglund via
cctalk
Sent: Tuesday, August 3, 2021 1:33 AM
To: Gavin Scott ; General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic
Posts ; Fred Cisin
Subject: Re: Compilers and languages (Was: Help reading a 9 track tape
mån 2021-08-02 klockan 20:00
> On Aug 2, 2021, at 8:45 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctech
> wrote:
>
> On 8/2/21 8:11 AM, James Liu via cctech wrote:
>> Thanks for feedback and offers to assist.
>
> Happy to contirubte.
>
>> For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's
>> at CERN on the CDC 6600. My
On 8/2/21 8:11 AM, James Liu via cctech wrote:
> Thanks for feedback and offers to assist.
Happy to contirubte.
> For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's
> at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less
> insisted on coding in assembly since he
mån 2021-08-02 klockan 20:00 -0500 skrev Gavin Scott via cctalk:
>
>
> Another interesting question is whether the currently shipping
> version
> of a language written in itself was compiled using the same version
> of
> itself or the previous version. I recall HP compilers generally being
>
On 8/2/21 5:53 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
> He did say "in the 1960s" so it may have been an early one without the high
> quality optimizations that grew over time.
FTN was spawned during the 1960s. Bitsavers has the GIM from 1966:
On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 6:07 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk
wrote:
> One of the rites of passage (not necessarily the only one) in "computer
> science" education is that every grad student invents a new language, and
> writes a compiler. The compiler is not considered finished until the
> current
Some might argue with you about that. PL/M was done in Fortran IV.
A REAL programmer can write a FORTRAN program in any language.
A REAL programmer can write any program in FORTRAN. (although, it is
often the wrong tool for the job, possibly resulting in too much work and
poorer
On 8/2/21 4:47 PM, Dave Wade G4UGM via cctalk wrote:
Depending on what he was trying to do that may well be a valid
assessment. CDC Fortran was known to be pretty good, but Fortran is not
the obvious answer for implementing interpreters or other language
processors, which this sounds like.
On 8/2/21 4:42 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Mon, 2 Aug 2021, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
Some might argue with you about that. PL/M was done in Fortran IV.
A REAL programmer can write a FORTRAN program in any language.
A REAL programmer can write any program in FORTRAN. (although, it is
> > Depending on what he was trying to do that may well be a valid
> assessment. CDC Fortran was known to be pretty good, but Fortran is not
> the obvious answer for implementing interpreters or other language
> processors, which this sounds like.
> >
>
> Some might argue with you about that.
On Mon, 2 Aug 2021, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
Some might argue with you about that. PL/M was done in Fortran IV.
A REAL programmer can write a FORTRAN program in any language.
A REAL programmer can write any program in FORTRAN. (although, it is
often the wrong tool for the job,
> On Aug 2, 2021, at 4:14 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
> wrote:
>
> On 8/2/21 12:19 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>>> On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:11 AM, James Liu via cctech
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from
>>> one of the maintainers
On 8/2/21 12:19 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:11 AM, James Liu via cctech wrote:
Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from
one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made
around 1978 at SLAC.
For some background,
> On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:11 AM, James Liu via cctech
> wrote:
>
> Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from
> one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made
> around 1978 at SLAC.
>
> For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in
Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from
one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made
around 1978 at SLAC.
For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's
at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less
Hi Jim,
I have a 9track drive hooked to my old Sun IPX which may be able to read your
tape.
I am in Valapraiso IN if you are up for a drive.
Best,
--tom
On 7/30/21 1:02 PM, James Liu via cctech wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been lurking for a few years, but thought I'd finally speak up
> as I just
If you care about what is on that tape, send it to Chuck for recovery.
I wouldn't trust someone without a lot of experience in tape
prep and recovery with something I thought was important.
On 7/31/21 8:08 AM, Jon Elson via cctech wrote:
I'll add a thought that if this is a CDC 6000-system tape written in the
1970s, it could well be 7-track, regardless of the manufacturer's label.
Up through the 1970s, 7 track tape drives were very common on CDC systems.
--Chuck
On 7/31/21 8:08 AM, Jon Elson via cctech wrote:
> Where are you? I have a CDC Keystone drive that worked last time I
> fired it up,
>
> and I have it interfaced to a Linux PC. I'm in Missouri.
I wonder if the OP is in the Netherlands, Schoonschip being a Dutch product.
In any case, I'd
On 7/30/21 1:02 PM, James Liu via cctech wrote:
Hi,
I have been lurking for a few years, but thought I'd finally speak up
as I just received a 9 track tape purportedly containing the source
code to Schoonschip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoonschip). This
is a 2400' reel recorded at 1600
Hi,
I have been lurking for a few years, but thought I'd finally speak up
as I just received a 9 track tape purportedly containing the source
code to Schoonschip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoonschip). This
is a 2400' reel recorded at 1600 bpi based on the labels, and a
cursory examination
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