IBM 1401

IBM 1401 tribute to Apollo XI

The project consists of a simple program that reads two pages worth of text from punched cards and prints them on the printer. Several wrinkles are added to this:

1- The printer line is 132 character wide but the punch cards are only 80 character wide. So each original ASCII art lines are broken into two consecutive cards, one with the first 80 characters and one with the last 52 characters.

2- To facilitate printing a lot of copies without having to re-read the deck of cards each time, all the data cards are first read into core memory and printed once. The program then halts. Any further press on the START button will start another print, this time reading the data directly from core memory. This limits the printout to only two pages with our (maxed out) 16 kW core memory system!

3- A card containing -EOF- will cause the printer to jump to the next page before continuing printing the content of the next cards

4- A card containing -END- will cause the program to stop reading any further cards and start printing the content it loaded in memory.

Source code:

• Apollo Print IBM 1401 Source Code

Object deck:

• Apollo Print Object Card Deck

ASCII art

• Apollo XI ASCII graphics
• P63 listing page

ASCII data input cards decks:

• First page (Apollo XI data deck)
• Second page (P63 data deck)
• Data deck with both pages combined

Executable tape to punch the deck:

• Program + Data Deck Self-Punching from Tape

(note that this file uses Pierce A encoding to conform with our tape emulator convention)

IDE, Autocoder Compiler and IBM 1401 emulator to compile and run the project on a PC, Mac or Linux computer:

• ROPE emulator