>I have actually worked for three companies where paper tape was actually
>used every day. The nice thing about paper tape is that you can visually
>inspect the output and know what was on it. There were commonly two ways to
>store it, fan folded or rolled.
A company I used to work for created paper tapes to run
semiautomatic wirewrap machines for building circuit
boards. They had modified a DEC paper tape punch to be
driven from a Digilog CP/M machine.
Some time later, the company acquired a semiautomatic
wirewrap machine of its own. We then used the tapes we
created. After a while, they modified a PC to emulate
the paper tape reader; we still generated the paper tape
files, but instead of punching paper tapes we stashed the
files on the Novell server and pointed the PC at them.
The semiautomatic wirerap machine still moved the paper
tape reels, but the data coming in from the reader head
was supplied by the PC instead of by the paper tape.
>3. 1978 McDonnell-Douglas where the programs loaded into individual
>missiles were punched onto Mylar paper tape and a copy stored in a vault for
>positive verification of the program that was loaded.
In the late '80s I wrote an RT-11 device driver for a mylar
tape reader for the A7 guys in China Lake. The previous
software they were using had hardcoded paper tape input
routines. Our new software generalized the mylar tape
loading into file operations, so it was now possible to
store files on disk and load them into the A7 mission
computer. The RT-11 device driver allowed us to still
use the actual mylar tapes.
--
Roger Ivie
rivie_at_teraglobal.com
Not speaking for TeraGlobal Communications Corporation
Received on Fri Jan 05 2001 - 11:18:42 GMT