NAME¶

x026 - IBM keypunch emulator

SYNOPSIS¶

x026

DESCRIPTION¶

x026 is a simulation of an IBM 026 keypunch.

It allows input from the keyboard or by pasting the X11 selection with the middle mouse button. Keyboard input is deliberately paced so that typing occurs at a realistically slow pace. This can be overridden with a command-line option. If the selected character set does not support lower-case characters, they will be mapped to upper-case characters. If the selected character set does not support a particular character at all, it will be ignored.

Multiple punches in a single column can be entered by holding down the Alt key.

The current card can be moved left and right with the left and right cursor keys, and back to column 1 with the Home key. There is one configured tab stop, which is set up to skip to the body of a FORTRAN statement.

The current card is stored, and the next card fed in, with the Return key.

There is a button to discard the current card; it will be replaced with a blank card with the same sequence number as the discarded card.

The virtual card deck can be saved in one of two ways. The Save Ascii option saves the deck as ASCII (actually ISO 8859-1) text, with multi-punch columns implemented as backspaces. The Save Images option saves the deck in Douglas Jones's standard card deck format (see http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/index.html for details).

OPTIONS¶

x026 is a toolkit-based program, so it understands standard Xt options and resources (e.g., -geom). It also understands the following options:

-ifont font

Interpreter (card edge) font. Defaults to 7x13.

-nonumber

Do not automatically number the cards in columns 73 through 80.

-typeahead

Allow typeahead. This is very un-026-like.

-charset name

Keypunch character set:

bcd-h	026 FORTRAN (default)
bcd-a	026 commercial
029	029 standard
1401	IBM 1401
ebcdic	S/360 EBCDIC

-card name

Card image:

collins	Collins Radio Corporation
cmu	Carnegie Mellon University

-026ftn

Alias for -charset bcd-h.

-026comm

Alias for -charset bcd-a.

-029

Alias for -charset 029.

-EBCDIC

Alias for -charset ebcdic.

-help

Display command-line syntax help.

BUGS¶

The author obviously has very little experience with real keypunches, and would appreciate any input on how to make x026 a more realistic experience.

Sound effects would be an obvious addition, but are notoriously non-portable.

AUTHOR¶

Paul Mattes