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

[salfter@salfter.dyndns.org (Scott Alfter)]

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In article <ao2b6.51036$lV5.814356@news2.giganews.com>,
Nick Bensema <nickb@fnord.io.com> wrote:
>In article <ouja6.2741$CP4.876134@typhoon2.ba-dsg.net>,
>Xcott Craver <sacraver@use.my.princeton.address> wrote:
>>Nick Bensema <nickb@fnord.io.com> wrote:
>>>I wonder why nobody invented paper tape readers for microcomputers,
>>
>>	You kept this idea to yourself, didn't you?  You had this idea
>>	in the 80s but kept it to yourself while I had to "A9 02" for 
>>	three hours, didn't you?  Oh, ho-ho boy, oh boy, ooOOOooooooh.
>
>Well, nobody would have listened; in early 1980 I was 2; in late 1989
>I was 12.
>
>And, having such bad eyesight as I did, I never even TRIED typing in
>those damn things.  Well, I think I tried once and got like twelve
>lines in or so.

It's somewhat good typing practice, or at least BASIC programs were.  Typing
in hex dumps is a bit different, but it was faster (for me, anyway) than
typing in the source code and assembling it.  (You also didn't have to
translate the printed pseudo-ops into the (usually different) pseudo-ops
used by your assembler.)

>>	At the very least I'm surprised that COMPUTE! and etc didn't print
>>	something a little more intelligent than hex with a simple checksum.
>>	They could have used alphanumerics to give each keypress 6 bits 
>>	rather than 4.  This would have cut our typing time by *one fricken 
>>	third*, and take up considerably less space in their magazine.
>
>If I'm not mistaken, the Atari magazines weren't so smart.  They had
>us type in decimal, meaning three keystrokes per byte.

Hex with a checksum per line and for the whole file was typical for Apple II
magazines.  Nibble had two ways to go: a free checker published in every
issue that checked each line as you typed it, or an editor you could buy
from them that would check an entire program in one shot.  Me being the
cheapskate I was, I rigged their free checker so it would check whole
programs.  I sent it to them, but they weren't interested (gee, I wonder why
:-) ).  That hacked version has been useful for scanning/OCRing
programs...first time I tried that was in 1989 on a Mac IIx with an Apple
Scanner and OmniPage (or its predecessor if it had a different name back
then), and it worked fairly well at weeding out OCR errors.  (I really ought
to scan in my Nibble collection sometime...paper doesn't last forever.)

>And as for an optical magazine- program scanner, I'd like to see someone
>design such a thing such that it would be easy to make, or mass-produce at
>reasonable prices, in the 80's.  Because if it was possible, it's
>completely stupid that they didn't do it.

There was such a device, the Cauzin Softstrip reader.  It was available for
the Apple II, Mac, and x86 boxen, and a few magazines published some of
their programs with it.  (You could also print your own strips to make a
"dead-tree backup" of your files.)  It never really caught on, though.  It
wasn't too outrageously priced (under $200 IIRC), but I suspect that the
market of people entering their software from magazines wasn't big enough to
support it.

  _/_
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(IIGS(  Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull number to send email)
 \_^_/  http://salfter.dyndns.org
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