Back before the days of 8 inch floppy disks, storing computer programs was much more primitive than even a stack of punch cards. The earliest general purpose computers used paper tape, a strip of ...

[Scott M. Baker] wants a paper tape punch for his retrocomputer collection. That’s fine with us, we don’t judge. In fact, these electromechanical peripherals from the past have a lot going for them, ...

(1) A slow, low-capacity, sequential storage medium used on earlier computing and communications devices. Paper tape holds data as patterns of punched holes. (2) A paper roll printed by a calculator ...

COMMENTARY--I started using computers in 1974, when I was still in high school. My first computer took up an entire room and yet had only five kilobytes of RAM. Punched paper tape was the main form of ...