Classic computing fanatic David Lovett is constructing his personal vacuum tube pc, impressed by Motorola’s traditional MC14500 one-bit chip — and has efficiently created a working paper-tape reader for loading its software program into reminiscence.
“Getting [a device] to learn paper tape is a fairly large problem,” Lovett admits. “I am not simply going to purchase some generic paper tape reader that was constructed within the ’70s that does not actually match with the aesthetic and the theme that I am going with right here, which is making an attempt to construct as a lot myself as doable — so we will try to construct a paper tape reader from scratch, and that’s robust.”
Paper tapes, often known as punch-tape, have been continuous-feed alternate options to punch-cards — bodily paper playing cards with holes punched by means of at key factors, which could possibly be used to report and reload each information and packages into a pc’s reminiscence. Impressed by the programmable looms of Basile Bouchon and colleagues within the 1700s, paper tapes gave option to magnetic tape, then magnetic discs, then optical disks, and to as we speak’s solid-state storage units.
The Usagi Electrical Vacuum Tube Laptop (UEVTC), a work-in-progress challenge to construct a one-bit machine impressed by Motorola’s transistor-based MC14500 industrial management chip in discrete vacuum tube type, wants aesthetically-appropriate storage, although, which is the place Lovett’s return to paper tape is available in. Machined from aluminum, the reader positions photodiodes over every of the 9 holes within the paper tape — eight for every little bit of the byte being learn and one clock bit — to show the paper again into information.
The construct is documented in full within the video embedded above and on the Usagi Electrical YouTube channel; extra info on the UEVTC challenge as an entire is out there on GitHub.