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I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today

codeberg.org

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Re: I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today

#41

Post by EgoIncarnate »

rjsw wrote: post #20
rep_lodsb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "paper tape" (that's a digital storage medium), just a printout. And the numbers in the left half are not actually part of the source file, they are line numbers and machine code output produced by the assembler. You'd probably better not waste time transcribing them. Not trying to dissuade you, but here's some things you should consider: • Turn off your spell checker, it will only make this more difficult!…

There are PDP-10 emulators with well-maintained copies of the different operating systems for them, so someone could check that the typed up source can be assembled.

I don't think it would help. As far as I can tell, the source doesn't include the macros needed to actually perform an assembly.

Re: I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today

#42

Post by fzzzy »

diggernet wrote: post #36
Cryptoclidus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just impressed nobody peeled away the perforations on this printout: https://images.gatesnotes.com/12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542...

Hard to be certain, but those edges look non-perforated to me.

I agree. I don't think they are perforated.

Re: I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today

#44

Post by larsbrinkhoff »

LuciOfStars wrote: post #2

No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape , I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!

You're not an idiot. I have transcribed several listings manually. I also tried OCR. In my experience, fixing OCR mistakes take at least as much work as just typing the whole thing.

I recruited a team to transcribe a particularly important document, and I had us type each page to catch typos.

Re: I'm manually transcribing the AltairBASIC source, ten lines a day starting today

#46

Post by ralferoo »

ralferoo wrote: post #21
LuciOfStars wrote: post #2

No AI or OCR here, just an idiot with too much free time. After seeing that the AltaBASIC source posted was a scan of paper tape , I thought having it in a digital document proper would be good for preservation and novelty's sake. I've never written Assembly, and I'm not a typography expert! Feel free to point and laugh at any silly mistakes. Let's see how many days it takes!

If you've spent 7 days so far and got as far as "F3", I wondering if this is actually some kind of elaborate troll. At the rate of one byte per week, you might finish transcribing the 4K ROM within 8 decades.

Oh haha, just seen the reply below mine that has a link to the photos of the printout...

Interestingly, the large F3 appears to be a batch number for the print job, so it's just coincidental that it's the same as the first byte in the ROM. The first byte starts on line 732 and printed in octal not hex, so "000363" (the first byte of the output seems to be some kind of markup for addresses in multi-byte opcodes (immediate loads seem to have 000 for these).

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