[GreenKeys] Punching Human Readable Characters on 8 level tape?

[David Tumey]

Well done Charles!--daveW5DT
      From: Charles <charlesmorris800 at centurytel.net>
 To: w2hx at w2hx.com 
Cc: GreenKeys Digest <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net> 
 Sent: Saturday, October 17, 2015 7:11 PM
 Subject: [GreenKeys] Punching Human Readable Characters on 8 level tape?
   
Hello friends,

Does anyone know of a program (maybe one I can run on a PC) that will take 
an ASCII string of characters and output a series of 8-bit bytes that when 
sent to a tape punch, will create human readable characters on the tape? A 
single ASCII character would typically require several bytes to form the 
character.  I guess it might be called a "Banner Program" or something like 
that. Anyone know of something?

Thanks

73 Eugene W2HX
--------------------------

So that inspired me to write (and debug, which took a lot longer) today a 
little program in PDP-8 assembly language to print ticker-tape, just for the 
mental exercise. Only handles 0-9 and A-Z for the moment, and that was 
enough tedium entering the font one character at a time! Fortunately those 
are available in DECUS FOCAL8-87 although crude (5x6 matrix).

Unfortunately at the moment I have no good way of getting it out of my 
PDP-8/A so someone else can have a copy (and hopefully improve it). Not only 
that, after numerous feet of paper tape had passed through my 33's punch, it 
started to punch a hole here and there that it's not being commanded to 
do... looks like TV static "snow" ;)
Time for some more lubrication/tinkering with the punch, I guess!

-Charles

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