> On Mar 1, 2026, at 2:34 AM, Steve Lewis via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> ...
> Anyway, apologies - it was just something that only recently occurred to
> me, that basically all of the original operating systems originated on
> punch cards: CTSS, Supervisor, AOSP, SCOPE, even MULTICs.
That's certainly not true. It may be true for card-centric outfits like IBM.
I don't know what early DEC development looked like, but considering the rarity
of card handling equipment on DEC systems I would expect paper tape.
Early software for the Dutch machines I know was done on paper tape. In some
cases that involved punch equipment with custom-designed coding; for example,
the Electrologica X1 had a rudimentary assembler in ROM (along with a BIOS) and
source text was given to it on 5-channel paper tape, in a code slightly above
straight binary machine language.
Its successor the X8 had paper tape I/O standard, and the standard executable
file loaders used paper tapes. Ditto the bootstrap. The famous THE operating
system was a paper tape batch system, with the OS image supplied on tape
(though I think at some point it was moved to magtape for faster startup). No
punched cards were seen there until the X8 was replaced by a Burroughs 6800,
circa 1974, and even that machine had paper tape input to support all the
applications that had the input data on paper tape. My father's precision
measurement lab (part of the ME department) had instruments that punched the
measurements onto paper tape, for later processing by that central computer
system. All that was in ALGOL, by the way.
paul
