Hello! On a setup like that? I may not know UNIX as much as I want to, as much as all of you, but I do know my way around a DG Eclipse and a Mergenthaler 202. Do recall who set things up? Because they did it wrong. That Mergenthaler 202 had a dedicated port for communicating with the host. The tape reader was only used upon starting the machine when it gets uncrated by the company rep. The new users need to follow a series of steps to load the fonts into the machines internal storage. The user needs to use a special system to write a FST tape to do that. Now if you were talking about a Mergenthaler VIP then yes you'd need to go through the tape device, a special contraption was constructed to translate serial into something the tape device understood. How do I know this? My father ran a series of phototypesetting shops each being run by DG hardware, including that fellow. While those systems didn't run the dedicated OS that DG normally supplied, they ran one written for the purposes of doing composition. Incidentally some of the features of UNIX were constructed to do phototypesetting, and in this case that's how copies of the C programming book were originally set. Now I freely admit if someone did indeed succeed in porting UNIX to that DG, and in fact that's why the two were connected that way, but for the vast majority of shops during the late 80s and during most of the 90s who bought the software I've described and also the hardware that's how it was done. The one who did not. picked the same hardware, but an APS Mark 5 type printer...... I'd give one of my favorite character's lives (if possible) to obtain one of those specialized terminals..... It was similar to the Altair and ASR33 (with paper tape reader/punch feature enabled) but it used a VDT. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 7:52 AM, Milo Velimirovic <milov(a)cs.uwlax.edu> wrote:

Hello! Indeed. I did know about the MV series of machines and in fact that's the fellow I met during the period that I referenced. I knew that no such port was constructed for the first generation machines. And incidentally the DG machines I first met were a NOVA-2 and then a NOVA-3. Finally one who started out as a NOVA-4 but became an MV Eclipse design. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 1:09 PM, <cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote: