For the education of the newbies, I'm going to take paper tape back to
the '60s. I was in the Air Force from 1960-1964 as an electronics
technician maintaining cryptographic equipment, some of which was used
with teletype equipment. Teletypes used a 5-bit code called Baudot code.
For those of you who have heard the term baud before, it represented a
single character in the Baudot code. There was a specific code that
shifted between letters and numbers/figures modes, so that there could
be more than 32 values represented.
Messages could be punched onto a paper tape from a keyboard and then
later transmitted through a tape reader into a communications link. Or,
on the receiving end, a message could either be printed by a teletype or
punched into a paper tape for further transmission or later printing.
The technology was eventually used with early computers, as you are
hearing here.
Mike Myers
Mentor Services Corporation
On 01/13/2017 03:35 PM, David W Noon wrote:
On Fri, 13 Jan 2017 14:21:58 -0600, Tom Marchant
(0000000a2a8c2020-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu) wrote about "Paper tape
(was Re: Hidden Figures)" (in
<3742476116017335.wa.m42tomibmmainyahoo....@listserv.ua.edu>):
On Fri, 13 Jan 2017 13:56:57 -0600, Mike Schwab wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_tape
About 1974-75, I lived with my dad, manager of a Kroger store. At
night he would insert various strips of punch film into a reader to
report the store's daily transactions.
Well into the 1970's almost every mainframe shop used paper tape.
What was it used for?
In the mid 1970s I was working for a multi-national chemical company in
Melbourne, Australia. We had 2 paper tape readers and 1 paper tape
punch. They were used mostly for threatening young programmers who spoke
derisively about punched cards. ... :-)
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