On 01/13/2017 02:21 PM, Tom Marchant wrote:
> 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?
>
I would question the "almost every mainframe" part, unless you possibly
restrict consideration to non-IBM mainframes. IBM mainframes more
commonly used punched cards as input/output media, with punched tape
only available as a cheaper (and less capable) alternative to cards on
smaller systems. Of the roughly 10 IBM systems I had contact with
during 1960's and 1970's, only one had paper tape I/O.
The mechanical simplicity of feeding continuous paper tape vs complex
mechanisms to reliably feed individual cards, and having to sense or
punch a small number of channels on paper tape vs the 80 columns for a
card, surely made paper tape devices cheaper to design and build.
I suspect paper tape devices may have been more common on non-IBM
mainframes. Unit record punched card equipment was the core of IBM's
business prior to manufacturing electronic computers, so at the
beginning of the computer age IBM would have already had the expertise
and patents for building reliable punched card equipment. Other
vendors probably couldn't supply competitive card equipment at the time..
Joel C. Ewing
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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