Re: Paper tape readers for micros. (Re: I feel 31337!111!!)

[c64@fiberia.com]

Paul Guertin wrote:
> I had this deal with my mom: I would do the dishes, and then she would
> dictate hexadecimal to me for half an hour every night after dinner.
> Went through many an issue of Nibble that way.

The 64'er magazine had a system that encoded hex code into
strings that used all ascii chars plus a check sum.
With a special program (which I had to type in the hard way first),
you could type in these sequences without looking to the screen.
If you made a mistake, you would hear a sound if it detected
that the checksum didn't match.
I typed in a complete macro assembler this way, I think it was about
three pages of 4 columns each with the strings in a very tiny script.
It took me days to finish it.
And although it had the checksums, one mistake slipped through,
and I had to run through the whole thing again to find the mistake.

Luckily the internet became popular and we can download all
those wonderfull programs in a blink!