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<kerravon>for about US$3000 you can get a machine that apparently punches Jacquard cards for use by real weaving machines

<kerravon>but i was thinking - i'm having difficulty describing what i want - i should be able to get by with simple printouts or perhaps microfiche

<kerravon>have 72 bytes of binary data in lowercase hex, followed by 4 bytes, also hex, of a crc-16, followed by a 4-digit sequence number

<kerravon>if pdos was put onto punched cards, it is less than 9999 cards

<kerravon>i don't necessarily need my data to be machine-readable. i thought i did - but i think that is incorrect

<kerravon>so long as the data can by typed in again, it is not necessary (e.g. after a nuclear war) for someone to actually build a card reader (although, that may well be the way to go - as it was historically)

<kerravon>i guess i want my data to EVENTUALLY be machine-readable

<kerravon>and it could take 1000 years after a nuclear war (or embargo) for a computer to be built

<kerravon>and i want the PDOS source to be sitting there waiting for that day

<muurkha>right

<muurkha>printouts are a reasonable approach

<muurkha>and they can be machine-readabl

<muurkha>e

<kerravon>muurkha - how do you see printouts as machine-readable?

<kerravon>using a photocopier to bulk scan them and then OCR?

<kerravon> https://punchcardreader.com/

<kerravon>Your autofeed scanner is a card reader.

<kerravon>i'm wondering whether it would be better to create printouts of cards

<kerravon>they might be inherently easier to OCR

<kerravon>i mean - i personally can't write OCR software to read letters of the alphabet

<kerravon>and it took a long time for other OCR software to appear as well - so it is apparently difficult for others too

<kerravon>but i think i can write a program to look for black holes on a white-and-brown background

<kerravon>i can remember using OCR software in the early 90s and it was full of errors even on English text

<oriansj>kerravon: 72 bytes is relatively easy to hand punch into steel

<oriansj>or you could pick a different metal alloy with the desired long term storage properties and do metal tape reader

<oriansj>simpler than a punch card reader atleast to build

<oriansj>but unless you made some additional information no program in binary would actually mean anything to someone building a new computer

<muurkha>kerravon: yeah, OCR. OCR software for a particular font, especially a monospace font, isn't that hard to write. and you can use ECC with it too

<kerravon>oriansj - you know it is 72 bytes per card, right? And the PDOS binaries would be about 5000 cards

<kerravon>that's a hell of a lot of hand-punching

<stikonas>kerravon: you only need to punch hex0 monitor binary or something like that

<stikonas>that can then read your input from keyboard

IRC channel logs

2023-06-28.log