Punch Cards.

[Nicholas Robinson]

On Thursday 03 April 2008 23:06:44 Tim wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 10:25 -0600, Robin Laing wrote:
> > It was nice to see the TTY there.  I remember having a Star Trek
> > program on paper tape.  Let it roll down the outside of the residence
> > building at school.  It was over 10 stories long.
> >
> > We were the lucky ones in the second year.  We had a TI terminal that
> > had a cassette tape in it.  No more punch cards or paper tape for
> > us.  :)
>
> I would have thought paper tape to be more reliable than plastic tape.
> No stretching, no striction, reversable and relocatable for a re-read,
> repairable by your engineers when someone breaks it, duplicatable
> through various direct methods without degradation of data.
>
Yes, we had a very, very short-lived trial with cassettes for exactly the 
reasons you mention. We went on to these new-fangled floppy discs with a huge 
capacity of just over 100k bytes. We carried on using paper tapes for a 
while, just to be sure. We were real men though and had to repair our own 
tapes. It was tough in those days.

The typical session started with bootstrapping RIM into the PDP 8e and then 
loading the BIN loader off paper tape. Assuming you didn't make a mistake 
hand-loading the 30odd 12 bit instructions in the RIM loader and the paper 
tape didn't jam/fall out of the reader/stop for no apparent reason, you were 
in business and could then load another paper tape with something more 
interesting on it, like BASIC or Algol or an assembler (subject to the 
jams/falls/stops noted before). If the optical paper tape reader (300 or so 
cps) failed then we had to resort to the old teletype reader which was rated 
at 10 cps, but always seemed slower. Even with only 8k core memory, it still 
took a long time to load a big programme.

Ah, how the younger ones on the list must be enjoying reading about the lives 
of the when-we's.

Nick