4 ms·

Paper tape is indeed a descendant of the Jacquard Loom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom#Mechanical_Jacquard_looms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jac

Paper tape is indeed a descendant of the Jacquard Loom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom#Mechanical_Jacquard_looms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom#Mechanical_Jacqu...

ngcc_hk 8y ago
First thing i think of. In fact the Ibm for quite a while can be considered as a punch paper card company (and their first antitrust is about their use of that to meter the computer use)
- mirimir 8y ago
  Paper tape was even more of a pain than cards were. Or at least, in different ways. Cards jammed, it's true. But you could easily replace damaged cards. Repairing damaged tape was iffy. On the other hand, one might drop a stack of cards. So some of us would number the cards in pencil. Carefully, and lightly.
  - Animats 8y ago
    Colossus had an endless loop of paper tape zipping by to present patterns for matching. It wasn't a general purpose computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Ah. So they could have many copies of those tapes, and quickly replace ones that broke, right?
      - lb1lf 8y ago
        I seem to recall reading in either Kahn's or Sebag-Montefiore's book on Bletchley Park that one early failure mode of the tape was that it was run through the reader at a fast enough pace to occasionally catch fire. Oops.
        Animats 8y ago
        Basic problem of early computing: no good memory devices. IBM had electronic arithmetic before WWII, as an experimental tube multiplier. But nobody had a memory device that didn't require lots of parts per digit or bit. Hence cards and paper tape.
        mirimir 8y ago
        I had an old friend who worked with 60s era mainframes. You had a decent enough CPU, but no memory. And very slow storage. So you worked out some set of instructions with total execution time comparable to storage I/O. And put that into ~firmware. Then you read data from one device, and wrote data to another device. And kept repeating that, with other instruction sets, until you were done. That's not very different from current usage. Except that most intermediate results go into various sorts of memory. Or /tmp devices, if there's too much data for memory. And at the CPU level, instruction sets are just about as small. But the point is that one could process ~huge amounts of data. Many GiB, as I recall. Just very slowly, with lots of thrashing tape. And now one can use the same approach, except with clusters. And process humongous amounts of data.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    About 1995 I remember speaking to a guy who had programmed using a hand drill... He worked for a company that did industrial control systems and one plant (a steel mill I think) had a very old system controlling it that booted from tape. However, as it was very old the paper tape had long since worn out and had been replaced with a sturdy length of leather. He needed to make an alteration to the boot process so had to resort to the hand-drill.

Paper tape is indeed a descendant of the Jacquard Loom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom#Mechanical_Jacquard_looms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom#Mechanical_Jacqu...

ngcc_hk 8y ago

First thing i think of. In fact the Ibm for quite a while can be considered as a punch paper card company (and their first antitrust is about their use of that to meter the computer use)

mirimir 8y ago
Paper tape was even more of a pain than cards were. Or at least, in different ways. Cards jammed, it's true. But you could easily replace damaged cards. Repairing damaged tape was iffy. On the other hand, one might drop a stack of cards. So some of us would number the cards in pencil. Carefully, and lightly.
- Animats 8y ago
  Colossus had an endless loop of paper tape zipping by to present patterns for matching. It wasn't a general purpose computer. It was a key-tester, like a Bitcoin miner.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Ah. So they could have many copies of those tapes, and quickly replace ones that broke, right?
    - lb1lf 8y ago
      I seem to recall reading in either Kahn's or Sebag-Montefiore's book on Bletchley Park that one early failure mode of the tape was that it was run through the reader at a fast enough pace to occasionally catch fire. Oops.
      - Animats 8y ago
        Basic problem of early computing: no good memory devices. IBM had electronic arithmetic before WWII, as an experimental tube multiplier. But nobody had a memory device that didn't require lots of parts per digit or bit. Hence cards and paper tape.
        mirimir 8y ago
        I had an old friend who worked with 60s era mainframes. You had a decent enough CPU, but no memory. And very slow storage. So you worked out some set of instructions with total execution time comparable to storage I/O. And put that into ~firmware. Then you read data from one device, and wrote data to another device. And kept repeating that, with other instruction sets, until you were done. That's not very different from current usage. Except that most intermediate results go into various sorts of memory. Or /tmp devices, if there's too much data for memory. And at the CPU level, instruction sets are just about as small. But the point is that one could process ~huge amounts of data. Many GiB, as I recall. Just very slowly, with lots of thrashing tape. And now one can use the same approach, except with clusters. And process humongous amounts of data.
- arethuza 8y ago
  About 1995 I remember speaking to a guy who had programmed using a hand drill... He worked for a company that did industrial control systems and one plant (a steel mill I think) had a very old system controlling it that booted from tape. However, as it was very old the paper tape had long since worn out and had been replaced with a sturdy length of leather. He needed to make an alteration to the boot process so had to resort to the hand-drill.