3 ms·

Doesn't work on punch cards either :( (99% joking)

• Stratoscope 14y ago
  But it does work on paper tape. 0% joking. My first summer job was back in 1969 at a company in Phoenix called TransData. We had a program on the Sigma 5 called Ferret, which would copy data and read and punch paper tapes and stuff like that. You'd end up with a lot of rolls of paper tape with your various programs and files on them. The problem with these rolls was knowing which was which. Traditionally you would leave a few inches of blank tape at the beginning and write the file name on it with a pen. When you roll up the tape and put a rubber band around it, you've got the filename right there. This did get a little tiresome though. The paper tape for the ASR33 stored a byte at a time - eight holes that you could punch or not punch before the tape advanced to the next row. So I updated Ferret to punch out the filename in an 8px font that you could read after you rolled the tape up. And I'm almost certain it was a proportional font!