On 19.07.13 09:24, Kent A. Reed wrote: > Obviously you guys never had to depend on punched paper tape. I ran > through roughly a shipping pallet of blank tape---both rolled oiled tape > and folded dry tape varieties--- when I was using minicomputers to > gather experimental data in the early 1970s on the way to my PhD. With > just that small amount of tape processed, I had several times to field > strip and repair the mechanical punch and reader mechanisms on my > Teletype ASR33 (10 cps read/punch) and the mechanical punch mechanism on > my DEC high Speed Paper Tape Reader/Punch (300 cps read, 50 cps punch). > > 1. The "high" speed unit would take ca 277 hours to punch this job and > ca 48 hours to read it running continuously at full speed.
Ah, the days of "Clankety Clunkety Clank Bang - Whumpf!", as the ASR33 banged out its 10 cps, then the dashpot absorbed the recoil of the carriage return. And we dreamed of owning one - for the day when we would eventually build our own computer, the only imaginable way of owning one. My vintage is at the end of that era, though. Somewhere I have one of the fast paper tape readers we used when I started out on an HP2100A (with "980 ns" ferrite core memory). The read paper tape streamed damn near horizontal for a metre and a half in free air, before falling earthward. We had an old film rewinder, hand cranked, for respooling. I never saw any mylar tape, but they wouldn't offer the good stuff to students anyway, I figure. Sometimes I think it'd be fun to fire up the fast punch I have, but asking for a couple of rolls of paper tape at my IT supplier would probably earn a funny look. And I can just imagine asking for the splicing tape - sticky and prepunched with delete/rubout characters. Erik -- In attempting to ride roughshod over 1170 written submissions, a local government determination, a resident survey 94% against them, and years of protests, McDonald's is seeking to trash democracy, AFAICT. We do _not_ want them in our hills! BURGER OFF from Tecoma. See: http://www.burgeroff.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
