Reading Punched Paper Tape
https://iclces.uk/articles/reading_punched_paper_tape.html
@neauoire the longevity of paper tapes and punch cards is amazing. @phooky and I recovered some from a moldy basement and were able to read them fifty years later. https://trmm.net/Papertapes/
@maxc @neauoire @phooky 8-bit punch tape is possible, although I don't recall if the ASR-33 can send it (my recollection is it is hardwired for 7E2) http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dec/pdp8/software/DEC-08-NGCC-D_PaperTapeSW.pdf
@th Am i reading it right that it's 2 rows per byte, or is it a bitstream of 6 bits per row (with 7th bit in a row being some section delimiter)?
@maxc that's a weird format since it's PDP-8 with a 12-bit octal word, so two 6-bit rows == 1 word and the 7th punch is used to indicate that the next two rows encode the load address.
@th ah the 12 bit word is the context I was missing :) makes sense now.
@th @neauoire @phooky Indeed it is. Every 10 years the U.S. National Archives does a study of all known archival storage media and ranks them. Paper has always won by a huge margin and still does. Proper paper with proper ink, properly stored, easily lasts 1,000 years. The shocking thing is how poorly our modern media like CDs do. Horrible.
@th @neauoire @phooky the density is kind of awful but with how tiny most uxn roms are maybe it doesn't matter, haha, and for archival purposes I guess density is less of an issue vs mass media too.
Still sound super cool how robust it can be. I guess just don't get em properly wet and hope for no fires, haha. Seems like you could visually inspect for "corruption" very easily too.