[GreenKeys] [External] tape reader ID?

[Jones, Douglas W]

From:  Keith Lueck <kwlueck at swbell.net> -- Wednesday, August 12, 2020 10:28 AM
> America's First 'First' in Space<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3BS4G5ww8&feature=youtu.be&t=247>

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g3BS4G5ww8&feature=youtu.be&t=247>



At 3:09, the video shows the blinking lights of a 18-bit single accumulator computer with a 12-bit memory address extended to 16-bits by some kind of memory management unit.  It's not a PDP-8, but the front panel construction is very much in the style of the classical 1965-vintage PDP-8 that I have worked on.  The PDP-5, PDP-6 and PDP-7 front panels are different, aluminum, not black.  The PDP-9 and 10 didn't look like this either.  I wonder if this was a 1965 DEC custom version of the 18-bit PDP-7 instruction set?

At 4:08, you see a BRPE punch, on the right, and what, something like a model 28 reader on the left, running at the more leisurely speed of such devices.  It looks like high speed bursts of data punched on the BRPE are being buffered by a loop of tape feeding the slower reader.

At 8:25, there's a Tally model 424 high-speed paper-tape reader with the fanfold tape bin option.

         Doug Jones
         jones at cs.uiowa.edu
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