From: lucvdv AT null DOT net (Luc Van der Veken)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp,comp.os.cpm,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: EOF char.  (Was C++ and RHIDE)
Date: Wed, 08 Jul 1998 10:20:30 GMT
Organization: .
Lines: 30
Message-ID: <35a846ae.10944924@news.innet.be>
References: <359FFF58 DOT 71CE272E AT alcyone DOT com> <6nr1nh$6su$1 AT nntp2 DOT uunet DOT ca> <35A13F08 DOT 23950102 AT tnglwood DOT demon DOT co DOT uk> <6ntkvv$4g3$1 AT nntp2 DOT uunet DOT ca>
NNTP-Posting-Host: pool02b-194-7-177-150.uunet.be
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Precedence: bulk

atbowler AT thinkage DOT on DOT ca (Alan Bowler) told us

> In article <35A13F08 DOT 23950102 AT tnglwood DOT demon DOT co DOT uk> Robert Billing <unclebob AT tnglwood DOT demon DOT co DOT uk> writes:
> >Alan Bowler wrote:
> >
> >> to start the paper tape reader going, and the reader would stop
> >> when it read the next X-OFF.  Alternately, the machine use a timeout
> >> mechanism to decide when there was no more paper tape.
> >
> > The timeout on no tape I don't remember, the ASR33 simply had a plastic
> >peg that popped up and killed the reader at end of tape. 
> 
> The timeout I referred to was not on the TTY.  It was used on
> operating systems that had a "paper input mode".  The program issued
> some sort of "read paper tape input" command, and the OS would put
> the line in paper tape mode, it often came out of this mode based on
> a timeout of some sort (tape ran out so no more characters arrived),
> and then the program would process all the data received.
> Often the OS looked after collecting the data to disk in some
> raw fashion during paper tape mode.   

I remember this from a PDP11 I worked at. Normally we'd use
floppies and copy to harddisk, but for older things it had an
optical high-speed papertape tear^H^H^H^Hreader that would stop
automatically a second or so after it had torn your papertape in
two.

I don't know if it was the reader by itself, or the OS that made
it stop.