[HECnet] punched tape

[Clem Cole]

Amen.   Yep all generations of  CS students should read the paper:   http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD01xx/EWD196.html
is a transcription.    It's the first use of "rings" or "levels" that DC would implement later for VMS.


On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 2:46 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:

On Apr 19, 2013, at 1:48 PM, Lee Gleason wrote:

>
> How many people on this list have ever used paper tape at a job? My first computer job we used it to control phototypesetting machines. When an 11/70 was added to the mix of gear there, we ordered it with paper tape readers and punches on it to help in   transitioning away from the paper tape only gear it was replacing.

That was probably 6 bit tape -- most typesetters I've seen that were fed with tape used 6 bit tape.

My first programs were written on paper tape -- Flexowriter editing papertape typewriter/reader/punch machines, with a character set optimized for Algol 60.   That was at the Technical University Eindhoven, then known as THE -- which is where the operating system by that name came from.   It was a batch system: paper tape in, line printer output.   Magnetic tapes available in theory but rarely used, plus a drum for paging.   Processor was a Philips (Electrologica) EL-X8, a 27 bit machine with a rather exotic I/O architecture that I never really understood.

BTW, Flexowriters are great machines.   Teletype Corporation never built anything remotely as reliable as those -- certainly not the cruft known as Model 33, and even a Model 35 isn't as good.

Semaphores (in the computer science sense) were invented there.

            paul