Recovering 1969 Honeywell Paper tapes

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Recovering 1969 Honeywell Paper tapes	by Bill Degnan - 07/22/2020 12:22
Mysterious papertape with hand-printed text that reads "Start 1000 tty RUN -> 90" Click image for larger view. This thread details the technical aspects of the data recovery itself, if you want to learn the background story, visit https://www.kennettclass...ata-from-lunar-mission/ The short story is we received an ASCII papterape proported to have had been created containing a "data dump" from the 1969 American Apollo lunar landing. Teh tape was generated using a Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer located at a NASA facility in White Sands, New Mexico. Apparently an operator made a personal backup of the lunar landing data (?) Three tapes were supplied in addition to the Lunar Landing tape. The other's are labeled "ABCT" and "8X MEDIC" Click image for larger view. Using the DSI NC-2400 reader/punch I set it up to pull in the tapes, I created a dump file that appears to be accurate, at least a good first try. 21KB. Stand by for more! Reply
Tapes Archived	by Bill Degnan - 09/14/2020 11:38
The archiving is complete. You can download these tapes and read them into simH or other Honeywell DDP 300/500/ class emulator. Note that the binary tapes available from the link above are only viewable in a hex editor or directly downloaded into simH or actual Honeywell DDP system. Reply
Tapes Read - It's LUNAR LANDER	by Bill Degnan - 08/06/2022 17:04
Adrian Wise writes: "... Adrian Wise of Bracknell, United Kingdom Writes: Hi Bill I made some more progress. Although the end of the tape is missing, the BASIC interpreter stores the program text towards lower memory, see: http://www.series16.adri...IC-16A/BASIC-16A_3.html so I was able to recover the program source - all except the line numbers, which are stored (see the above link) in the "STATEMENT INDEX" at the top of core. However, a little guesswork based on the the targets of the GOTO statements allowed me to get a working program, DOWNLOAD HERE So, this is a port to BASIC of Jim Storer's Lunar Landing game. There's a really nice web page detailing that program here: https://www.cs.brandeis....Lander/LunarLander.html In particular the original FOCAL source code listing: https://www.cs.brandeis....arLanderListingText.txt you can see that the BASIC program retains the same (rather chaotic?) structure and many of the same line numbers I've run the BASIC lunar landing game on my "h16" emulator. Frustratingly addictive, despite its simplicity!..." Reply