| William H. Magill on Wed, 2 Apr 2003 11:57:11 -0500 |
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On Monday, March 31, 2003, at 01:25 PM, Edmund Goppelt wrote: Does anyone know what the following refer to? 1. "Electronic Tape" 7 track or 9 track 1/2 inch magnetic tape. It's anybody's guess what recording density or encoding scheme this is likely to be. However, with VERY FEW exceptions Unix boxes can't read them for the simple reason that the tape drive tends to cost 3 or 4 times as much as the CPU, and we won't even compare them to PC / Linux prices. (Ie drives are in the $20-40K range ... mechanical devices are not cheap.) Nominally (hopefully) you would get "card images" on tape (80 char records, blocked by some thing useful like 100 or 1000.) 2. "Common Language Tape, Channels_____" Most likely "Dictaphone belts" but it might also refer to a vendor specific media associated with some of the early "word processors," like the Wang. 3. "Tabulating Cards" I don't doubt that most "electronic" city records still exist in this form. IBM originally was called "International Business Machines" and made its money selling "tabulating machines" to government entities. (All of the election records were in this format not that long ago... it's easy to tell from the street lists, I forget when the format changed.) Many of these "tabulating machines" made their way into Carnival side show wagons and Boardwalk "fortune tellers" booths...(really IBM 083 card sorters). "Tabulating Cards" are also called "Punch Cards." Encoding can be either binary or EBCDIC... unless they came from Univac, in which case the Tab Cards are in ASCII. (And we are talking about REAL ASCII here -- the 7 bit code, not the 8 bit code that people pretend is ASCII today.) Of course getting a "card reader" for a PC is not unlike getting a 9 track tape machine... not cheap. However, "data ... eof" is part and parcel of Unix / linux and would read without (too many) "problems." 4. "Wire Transmission Bell Telephone" I don't want to think about what this might mean, but it might turn out to be your best bet --- IF they mean that they will put up a "data set" someplace that you can dial in and retrieve. (Don't count on FTP access, but you might luck out!) I would be very surprised if the city has the ability to burn a CD. And I do mean that literally. They are VERY backward when it comes to IT, and NOT just because of political considerations. Also, I assume that the "Deed Records" you are referring to are from the Prothonotory's office which has had a LOT of "IT" problems and changes in recent years. The last I knew, this was still a serious "main frame" operation (running mean-green-screens the last time I used it.) Consider also the fact that you are most likely asking for a HUGE volume of data. I would guess MANY 6250 BPI 9 track tapes worth. Let me know if I can be of any help. There are (or at least there were) a number of shops in the area that did data conversion... but they were not cheap either. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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