From: thad@public.BTR.COM (Thaddeus P. Floryan)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: Computer Relics (Was: 9 track data storage?)
Date: 29 Jul 92 09:22:58 GMT
Organization: BTR Public Access UNIX, Mountain View CA

In article <1992Jul24.072305.3393@spcvxb.spc.edu> terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.) writes:
>In article <1992Jul23.052322.21011@unislc.uucp>, thayne@unislc.uucp (Thayne Forbes) writes:
>> Lets make it more challenging.  Who still has any of these on a system
>> running today.  How about any two?  Anybody want to go for three?  I
>> have 9-track and paper tape concurrently as late as 1982 (although I
>> [...]

I obviously got into this thread late; just "discovered" alt.folklore.computer
when I wondered where one of my articles in sci.electronics disappeared to
(due to a "Followup-to:").

In any event, paper tape isn't as archaic as you make think: though many of
the old Cintimatic (sp?) milling machines and Behrens punch presses long
since went to direct digital control, the garment industry still uses paper
for things like stitching names on jackets, etc.

I discovered this when a buddy wanted to produce some computer jackets and
placed a plea for help on the net (about 5 years ago).  Luckily, I just
happened to have paper tape handling equipment on one of my systems; the
reason I had the PT stuff was because I discovered some "old" programs I
archived back some 30 years ago and I wanted to run them on some of my
home machines.  Neat programs, like satellite orbit tracking stuff and
stripline and microstrip design programs (they work fine, BTW (they were
in Fortran, so I just used f2c from research.att.com to compile)).  I
found the paper tape equipment at Weird Stuff Warehouse in Silicon Valley.

9-track is still in common use.  In fact, the US Postal Service will send
the ZIP code data for EVERY single address in the USA on a set of 9-track
tapes, and the data is updated (I believe) every 3 months (for four sets
a year); this service costs $$$, but is important to bulk mailers and
the like.

If you wanna talk old tape stuff, then let's go back even before the
DECtapes and talk 7 track.  Yeah, at 220, 556 and 800 BPI!  And two formats,
one whose tracks were wider than the other.  I can relate horror stories
such as attempting to read tapes from an RCA 3301 onto a PDP-10 and
re-writing them for a Burroughs B3500.  What I had to do was read each tape
15 times (on 15 different PDP-10 systems (I was at Tymshare at the time,
back in the 1960s)) and do a "best-fit" merge to form one good data set.
And this was the complete (and ONLY) parts list for a US Navy aircraft! :-)

And there was something else also that used hanging tape strips (forget
what it was called, but I believe it was developed by Sperry in the late
1950s; I only saw it in operation once and said "This'll never fly"), such
that when a strip was "addressed", it would get sucked onto a drum and then
be processed something like the old Dictaphone machines of the early 1950s;
I don't recall how the strips were returned to their racks (maybe this is
why the idea never caught on! :-).

Thad Floryan [ thad@btr.com (OR) {decwrl, mips, fernwood}!btr!thad ]