[rescue] Tektronix 4051 software?

Richard legalize at xmission.com
Wed Jul 20 15:11:31 CDT 2016


In article <57890665.4080005 at gmail.com>,
    Josh Dersch <derschjo at gmail.com> writes:

> On 7/14/16 11:55 PM, Meelis Roos wrote:
> > A friend has Tektronix 4051 that has tape reading problems. Does anybody
> > hav any pointers about where we might get 4051 tape images?
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, there aren't any.  Additionally, the only 
> machine that could read/write 4051 tapes is another machine in the 405x 
> series, the format is completely incompatible with anything else.  This 
> is made even more complicated given that unless you're lucky and have 
> the RS232 comm pack on your Tek, the only way to communicate with the 
> outside world from a 4051 is through the GPIB port -- so getting tape 
> images *to* a 4051 to write it to tape is tricky as well...

We need to homebrew up something that can accept modern flash card
media and act as a tape drive to the device.  I seem to recall
researching it at one point, although I may be confusing it with the
tape drive for the HP2648 graphics terminal.

At any rate, the maintenance manual for the 4051 on pg. 6-38 has an
overview schematic of the tape drive.  The tape drive board itself
has a rather simple interface.  Skimming through the description, it
seems to be a simple serial interface and some control handshake
signals.  Hell, you might even be able to just attach an arduino to
all the signals and transfer data through software emulation.
<http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/tektronix/405x/070-2065-00_4051_Service_Vol1_May77.pdf>
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