Wang paper tape format?

[Tom Jennings]

How about just slurping the tape in, and playing with trivial
transformations (various code set --> ASCII) to see if any
intelligence pops up?

If you had recognizable sentences, for example, followed by bursts
of nonsense, likely that's end-of-line gunk. And so on.

I recognize it's likely to not be voluminous free prose like this
email, easy to detect.  It might be very difficult to decode. It
seems unlikely (though possible) that a WP document was punched
onto tape; it is more likely to be a software patch, bootstrap,
diagnostic, diag or error dump, random utility, or
non-of-the-above.

Imbibe the hallucinogen of choice, and stare at the tape; you can
usually see binary-loader record patterns (often where they
actually exist).  Human eyes & brain are VERY good at spotting
visual patterns. Once I get in sync with a tape I can usually spot
ITA2 cr, lf, nul etc sequences, it's not hard.

Slurp to disk, leader and trailer and all, would probably be a
good start.








On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, Andrew K. Bressen wrote:

> Sellam, if you are still working that Wang tape, and think it had
> something to do with a Flexo, check YahooGroups for the Fridenites
> group; it's a Friden alums list. The inestimable Stan Kelly-Bootle
> turned me on to it.
>
> Flexos could be set up with pretty much any encoding desired
> within the limit of the number of channels supported by the model.
>
> Some of the custom hacks for various OEM's got pretty elaborate;
> the EDSAC I Friden reportedly managed to encode double-case with 5
> channels, an awful lot of state for a mechanical device to keep track of.
>
> Does the tape in question have enough bits to be a document
> of substantial size?
>
> I find myself thinking about IBM's printer control paper tapes, and
> wondering if what you have is not so much a document as the control
> instructions for printing a certain document, or the numbers or
> other info that were supposed to be merged into a document when printed...
>
>