Welcome to the Datatron 205 and 220 Blog

This blog is a companion to T J Sawyer's Web Page that outlines the history of the Burroughs Datatron 205 and Paul Kimpel's incredible 205 and 220 emulators. Please visit those sites and return here to post any comments.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Testing That New Burroughs 205

The new Burroughs 205 emulator that I described in the last post is working fine for just about any application that you might want to try using paper tape input and Flexowriter output.  I am hoping that some old-timers have saved some paper tapes from the 1950s and 60s and can translate them into text files and use the emulator.

I wrote up a quick program to calculate prime numbers and ran that through Paul's emulator.  It's great fun to watch the numbers march across the A register as the output emerges onto the Flexowriter.

I set up my program to print the primes in rows of ten so that they could be matched up against this listing of the first 1000 primes at the University of Tennessee, Martin. It was nice to find a listing like that which looks like it was just done on a Flexowriter!

Here's the code that I put onto my paper tape.  It loads directly into the 7000 band for most of the calculations but also uses the 5000 band for print formatting and the constants/variables are stored in the 6000 band.  Entry is to location 5015 which prints the first two primes, "2" and "3" and then the actual algorithm begins looking at 5 as the first true candidate.

When Paul describes how to use his emulator, you might want to start with this program as a test, stepping through it to jog your memory.

40000007000
646000
130010
616001
140010
47006
205009
646001
606001
140010
756000
736002
287013
205000
646001
746002
126001
207000
40000005000
646000
140004
30306
646004
756006
45008
70500
646005
126004
646000
746002
126000
646003
126001
207000
646007
030306
646008
030306
207000
40000006000
5
3
2
3
8
10
1
20000
30000
60000205015






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