Re: New meets old

On 6/17/25 19:43, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

On 6/17/2025 2:07 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:

On 2025-06-16, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:

On 6/16/2025 9:28 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Mon, 16 Jun 2025 15:15:39 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

sys.stdout.writelines(sys.stdin.readlines())
sys.stdout.writelines(sys.stdin.readlines())

>
Some interesting semantics going on there. How do you continue reading
after encountering EOF? How does it reset the EOF condition to let you get
the second lot of data?
>
Normally, once an open file gets to EOF, it stays in that state until
fseek(2) (or equivalent) is called.

>
You put 3 decks of punched cards in the card reader.

>
The fact VMS supported punched card devices always amuses me as it
clearly shows VMS with one foot in a long-obsolete era and the other
foot in a more modern era.
>
Did punched card support ever make it to Alpha ?

 You would need physical connectivity and a driver.
 A quick googling on VAX punched card reader points to
CR11 card reader connected to a UNIBUS card.

A very smart bit of work there.
If you have an old unibus backplane and power supply, you could use
a qniverter or unimap (sp?), to convert CR11 unibus to a qbus.
Years ago, unibus VAX730, no system disk, and used a qniverter to
connect to qbus backplane, and an RQDX3 to install and boot VMS
from an RD53. A bit glacial, but it did work.
Been doing quite a bit of data recovery from old machines recently.
Mainly scsi drives from various dec machines. Using the Suse Linux
11.4 disk utility. Excellent, and will read a variety of formats to
recover the files. Also use dd to image the whole drive.
Also have a load of rl02 and RA60 packs. The RA60 data is probably
a lost cause, as no longer have the drive, nor the controller
and machine to connect it to. The RL packs should be easier,
as still have an RLV12 controller, one hopefully good RL02 drive,
Just need to find the idc RL cable.
Chris

 So I doubt it.
 But DCL still got $ DECK and $ EOD.  :-)
 

BTW, did VMS ever have paper tape reader (and/or writer) support ?

 No idea.
 Arne
 

If yu have aunibus backplane,