🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <90045.160...@psuvm.psu.edu> BRL...@psuvm.psu.edu (Ben Liblit) writes:
>I was hired last summer to transfer some ancient records from an Apple ][+ onto
>a DEC. ...  I ran a serial cable from the Apple's
>printer port (a card, actually) right into the DEC...

I can beat that, or rather some friends of mine could.  This happened
close to 20 years ago.  Two pdp8 systems, with a file they wanted to transfer
from one to the other.  Incompatible disk drives, only one magtape, and
things like uucp were of course unheard-of then and there.  But both had
ASR33s as consoles.  They started the file printing to the console and
turned on the paper-tape punch.  Once enough of it had come out to reach
over to the other console, they threaded it into the paper-tape reader
there and started reading it in.

This worked fine, except for one little hitch:  the speed of an ASR33
is set by mechanical widgetry (everything in an ASR33 is mechanical...)
and they're not all at precisely the same speed.  They started out with
the two ASR33s across the room from each other.  By the time the file
transfer ended, they'd had to move them nose-to-nose, and the tape was
starting to get pretty taut...
-- 
"The N in NFS stands for Not, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
or Need, or perhaps Nightmare"| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry he...@zoo.toronto.edu