On Thu, Jun 8, 2023 at 6:01 PM Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> wrote:
> I wonder if mylar tape for punching could be found, or made. That was > seen occasionally, for applications where a tape needed to be read many > times. An OS binary tape might want that. I also remember seeing it on a > machine in my father's lab, where it contained correction factors for a > piece of precision machinery. > I've seen mylar tape used in a tiny loop where it controlled the movements of a printer platen. I don't recall now whether it was used for horizontal or vertical space - my recollection was the latter but it was a long time ago. I don't know why it wasn't controlled by ASCII - a good bit of the character set is dedicated to print head control. I think a different tape had to be installed to match the program that was being run. The machine was used for accountancy in about 1975, It was a bit like a large LA120 (but included the calculating part) and made by the french Logabax company. I worked in a manufacturing plant around 1985 where the (new) pick-and-place machine was controlled by a paper tape. The tape was punched on an ASR33 or similar. It seemed like an obsolete solution even though only just installed. I bought a very nice surplus Facit tape punch from a classified ad in Wireless World, built a serial to parallel interface and allowed the machine programmer to create the source on a word processor (which was our manufactured product) instead.
