Would an optical paper tape reader pass muster ;<) ... FWIW mine has variable sped and stop pedal capabilities, so you can be fairly gentle / careful - the feed arrangements are most important
Museum donations can be done well, see eg https://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/pdp8/ProgrammesAndManualsList.html PDP8 tapes much of it standard stuff, with copies described as "written by", but also locally generated programs - a seam to mine Martin -----Original Message----- From: Henry Bent via cctalk [mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org] Sent: 01 February 2024 14:52 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk@classiccmp.org> Cc: Henry Bent <henry.r.b...@gmail.com> Subject: [cctalk] Re: VCF SoCal On Thu, 1 Feb 2024 at 09:37, Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > > On Jan 31, 2024, at 7:16 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk < > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > > The Enter museum in Switzerland has a nice library of docs. I found > > that museum to be chock full of interesting German and other > > computers. Worth the trip. > > Bill > > Is any of that online? > > One frustrating thing about various museums is that they have stuff, > but you can't access it. For example, I know a museum with a > collection of 1950s software on punched tape, but they refuse access > to it for reading it. > Generally I have found that access to special collections is conditional on having credentials that the museum is willing to accept. In that case I can imagine that the museum might be willing to allow inspection, perhaps supervised, but that they would not be willing to allow their media to be run through a punched tape reader because they were concerned about the possibility for damage. Did you talk to them about the possibility of some sort of optical scanning? -Henry
