Line Feeds and Paper Tape

[Tom Lake]

I'm running a Teletype ASR-33 under RSTS/E 10
and when I punch a program to paper tape and the
program has lines longer than 72 characters, the
lines don't read back in correctly. The portion
past column 72 is cut off. Is there a way to punch such
tapes properly so they can be read in with no loss?

TIA

Tom Lake

[Howard S Shubs]

Post by Tom Lake
I'm running a Teletype ASR-33 under RSTS/E 10
and when I punch a program to paper tape and the
program has lines longer than 72 characters, the
lines don't read back in correctly. The portion
past column 72 is cut off. Is there a way to punch such
tapes properly so they can be read in with no loss?

Coming from a FORTRAN world, I can honestly tell you that there's no
column after 72.

[Bob Koehler]

Post by Tom Lake
I'm running a Teletype ASR-33 under RSTS/E 10
and when I punch a program to paper tape and the
program has lines longer than 72 characters, the
lines don't read back in correctly. The portion
past column 72 is cut off. Is there a way to punch such
tapes properly so they can be read in with no loss?

Sounds like the software writing to the tape is assuming that it is
writing Fortran source.

[Tom Lake]

Post by Bob Koehler

Post by Tom Lake
I'm running a Teletype ASR-33 under RSTS/E 10
and when I punch a program to paper tape and the
program has lines longer than 72 characters, the
lines don't read back in correctly. The portion
past column 72 is cut off. Is there a way to punch such
tapes properly so they can be read in with no loss?

Sounds like the software writing to the tape is assuming that it is
writing Fortran source.

It's just the BASIC-Plus LISTNH command. Lines can be up to 255
characters long but any line over 72 characters gets cut off when
read back in. The terminal width is specified in the initialization
at 72 for the Teletype port since, if I left it at the default of 80, a
LIST would print a bunch of overtypes at the end of each line when
the line exceeded 72.

Tom Lake

[John Santos]

Post by Tom Lake

Post by Bob Koehler

Post by Tom Lake
I'm running a Teletype ASR-33 under RSTS/E 10
and when I punch a program to paper tape and the
program has lines longer than 72 characters, the
lines don't read back in correctly. The portion
past column 72 is cut off. Is there a way to punch such
tapes properly so they can be read in with no loss?

Sounds like the software writing to the tape is assuming that it is
writing Fortran source.

It's just the BASIC-Plus LISTNH command. Lines can be up to 255
characters long but any line over 72 characters gets cut off when
read back in. The terminal width is specified in the initialization
at 72 for the Teletype port since, if I left it at the default of 80, a
LIST would print a bunch of overtypes at the end of each line when
the line exceeded 72.
Tom Lake

Most likely, the terminal width is set to 72 because that's all that
would fit on an ASR-33 with the original yellow teletype paper rolls.
So it was either inserting <CR><LF> when you did the LISTNH or it is
inserting them after 72 columns when it reads the tape back.

If you still have the original program on disk, you can repeat the
save to the ASR by

$ set terminal/width=80 ! or whatever you need, up to 255

Ready

OLD <PROGRAM>

Ready

<turn on punch>

LISTNH

(should save it properly)

Ready


(For versions older than 9.0, you'll need to use $ttyset instead of
"set terminal/width=", but you say above you have RSTS/E V10.0...)

If you no longer have the source file on disk, you'll need to read it
in to a file:

PIP FOO.BAS=KB:

(Turn on reader)

After it finishes reading, you'll probably need to type ctrl/Z (EOF)
to get PIP to exit.

Then you'll need to edit FOO.BAS to concatenate the long lines, or
to insert appropriate line continuation (&) at the ends of the broken
lines. Also, while you're editing, you should get rid of the "Ready"
at the end, though I think when you load the program into BASIC, it
will stop at the END statement and ignore anything after it.

You should probably do this on a wider terminal, either a VT-type
or a VT emulator on some type of PC or Mac or workstation, but if
the Teletype is the only terminal you've got, then set the terminal
width wide and use TECO or EDIT or EDT in line mode and you should
be able to fix it.

If you have Ethernet on your PDP-11, and a Unix or Mac system,
you can find a LAT package called LATD somewhere, download and
install it, and configure RSTS/E as a LAT server. Then you can
use the Mac or Unix/Linux system as a LAT client and log in.
(Forget when RSTS first supported LAT, but 10.0 is definitely
new enough.) This LAT package is reputed to be buggy, but it
worked well enough for me the few times I've tried it on Mac OS X.