John Korb wrote in message ...

>There were also card reader/punch devices for the HP 3000, but the only one
>of those I saw was connected serially to a MUX port (2400 baud) and so had
>a twenty-something LDEV number.  The reader/punch was very slow, very
>unreliable, and was not recommended by the computer center which owned it,
>while the dedicated reader (HP 2893A) was 600 CPM, quite reliable, and
>well-liked.

The Reader/Punch that I had connected to my Series II was based upon the
HP-30119A Card Reader Punch Subsystem, which consisted of an HP-2894A
Reader/Punch unit and an HP-30219A Universal Interface/Cable.   It would
Read at about 200 CPM and Punch at about 75 CPM.  The Reader/Punch unit
was actually manufactured by Decision Data and was slightly modified (an
additional
interface card and some backplane jumpers) from the standard units.  The HP
interface was configured on a MUX/IOP Channel (DMA Capable) and used 12 bits
of the 16 Parallel data lines.   Since I had already purchased a Decision
Data
unit for offline punching/duplicating tasks, I ordered their HP adapter card
and
schematics to make the unit  '3000 Ready'.  The Decision data salesman and I
did the upgrade after quitting time one day.  Then I installed the HP-30219A
interface in the Series II, set the Data Poll and DRT jumpers, installed a
timing
capacitor on the interface connector,  re-connected the interrupt daisy
chain
to include the interface, and configured LDEVS 5 (Reader) and 12 (Punch).
It worked the first time and was used heavily for 7-8 years after that.   We
saved about $10,000 or so by doing it his way (HP marked the price up by
about 150% over the Decision Data list).   Decision Data also did the
maintenance
for about half price (you definitely need a maintenance contract with
something
like that, since most of the mechanical parts are 'proprietary', expensive,
and
wear rapidly).

>Anyone remember PTAPE?
>
Yes.  It worked great unless you tried to read over ~32K bytes from the tape
 If you had more, you needed to do multiple invocations of PTAPE with append
access to the target disc file and do some manual resetting of the source
tape to
make sure you started reading again at the correct byte.  I eventually wrote
a PM
replacement using a circular pool of XDSs, Split-Stack, EXCHANGEDB,
non-blocked calls to ATTACHIO for both Tape Reads/Disc Writes, and LQ
priority
of about 50 to get around the 32K barrier (Sorry, I don't have the source
anymore
for you die-hard Classic 3000/Paper-Tape users).

Winston K.