I was digging through my collection at the weekend and came across a small portable paper tape reader(?). Can anyone help me identfy it?

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Pricing machines like PDP-8s is a difficult task. Due to the small numbers that change hands in any given year, it is often hard to put a firm price on them. It is however important for us to put a value on our collect not least to ensure that we are adequately insured against any disaster that might befall our beloved machines.

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I have two identically spec-ed PDP-8/As which I purchased a couple of years ago across ebay. The machines were originally from a CNC machine and feature 16KW of memory together with paper tape readers.

The cards fitted are as follows:

• M8315 – KK8A PDP-8/A CPU board (hex wide)
• M8317 – KM8AA PDP-8/A bootstrap, powerfail (hex wide)
• M8316 – DKC8AA PDP-8/A I/O serial/parallel/clock (hex wide)
• G650 – MM8AB PDP8A 16K Memory stack (hex wide)
• H219B – MM8AB PDP8A 16K Memory control (hex wide)
• G650 – MM8AB PDP8A 16K Memory stack (hex wide)
• H219B – MM8AB PDP8A 16K Memory control (hex wide)
• Third party paper tape drive controller

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On Wednesday I took possession of two PDP8/M’s rescued from a skip(!) by Paul Williams. It amazes me that -8s still land in skips at the end of their days and congratulations to Paul on such an amazing find of no less than 3 PDP-8s (the other being an -8/E)

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