Paper Tape Fun

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Tue Dec 18 06:25:41 2001

> I recently acquired (out of desperation) a DSI paper
> tape punch/reader on ePay (at a reasonable price, but
> not guaranteed to work). I cleaned it up, oiled it
> here and there, and after puzzling out the RS-232, got
> it running punching Mylar fine. To test it, I wrote a
> Windows program to test it out with; the program lets
> you type in a phrase, looks up the ASCII, and prints
> the letters out on the tape in a 7x5 matrix format,
> upper and lower case. I'm pretty sure that there were
> programs that ran on mainframes to do this sort of
> thing. Useless, but kind of fun - I made a banner for
> my museum with it. If anyone on this list has a
> punch, and admits to using Windows, ha ha, I can make
> this available.

On the CDC 6600, we had a Model 415 High-Speed Paper Tape
Reader/Punch. We had a locally-created control card we'd
use to control the disposition of output. In the standard
KRONOS system, it was DISPOSE, but we had so many devices
spread out over so many campuses that we wrote a card we
called ROUTE. Among other tasks, ROUTE provided the banner
pages for print jobs. A standard feature of the banner was
the job name, usually, your three initials plus a job ordinal.

When you'd sent output to the tape punch, it would punch
the job name at the start of the tape, in the manner you
describe.

Regards,
-dq
Received on Tue Dec 18 2001 - 06:25:41 GMT