Tuesday, June 9, 2026

Do You Have a 1970s 800 BPI Tape Drive?

When I wasx n high school I wrote a veey nice text editor in assembly language for the Interdata 7/16 series of minicomputers. (Interdata's text editor was awful, limited to what would fit into its 64K of RAM, and slow). I found the tape while going through my random collection of stuff. I would dearly love took get access to it again. Any Suggestions?

This is EBCDIC not ASCII. 9 track tape.

4 comments:

  1. Yeah. Fuggedaboudit. If you had a drive to read the tape, you'd have a file of Interdata assembly source code. What could you do with that? You'd need to create an Interdata emulator to run the Interdata assembler on (assuming you could find an assembler), and to run the editor after you generate the binary.

    Or you could write an emulator that executes the assembly source.

    Somehow I don't see this as worth the trouble, except as a recapture-of-youth exercise.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. https://opensimh.org/interdata_sw.html

      Not surprisingly, you can just download an emulator, and I'm sure someone somewhere has the full suite of tools for the platform, too.

      Delete