Back to the early 70s and the start of my career... as a lowly trainee operator on an ICL 1904 at the local University... The programmers would supply their compiled programs in the form of spools of paper tape, just because the spools were physically compact. After reading in the same program a few times, the tape would begin to wear and eventually become so fragile that it would wreck in the reader. At which time it became the job of yours truly to repair the damage by duplicating the wrecked portion of tape, one hole at a time, on a manual punch, then splicing the new piece in to the original spool. Ah... them were the days...
I've seen mentions in this thread about '5-hole' and '8-hole' tape... I remember being taught about 5-hole tape, but I never actually saw any. But I've no memories at all about '8-hole' tape. The tape mentioned above was had 7 holes across the width. Just as has been described with the '5-hole' tape, there were 'Shift In' and 'Shift Out' codes to allow for switching between alphabetic and numeric code sequences. On 16 January 2017 at 07:41, Randy Hudson <[email protected]> wrote: > In article <[email protected]> Joel Ewing > wrote: > > > 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. > > He's referring to the carriage control tape that was used in lineprinters. > It was not punched under mainframe control, but by operators, as part of > helping the mainframe control the forms within the printer. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
