Thanks for sharing that.

The PDP11/70 I used didn't have one, or didn't have it attached when i used it last in '86. We used MUSIC/E on glass terminals for just about everything.

We had two 11/70s where I worked. Only the older of the two had a paper tape reader and older style Core memory. In my mind I can still hear the signature sound it’s LA-34 console terminal made whenever it crashed.

my grandmother work had one one of the programmer made for me it was my name

How cool! We didn’t have a device for writing the tapes. Only reading them.

Lol. I'll make you a good deal on a barely-used (ever used?) Fanuc machine tool reader/writer! :)

it was nice i had for a whale than lost it

I have not seen any of those in a long, long time.

I'd hazard to guess that 90% of the members here on FA have never seen paper tape.

So I suppose this is what punch cards evolved into.

Actually, I'm not sure which came first: punch cards or paper tape.

Nerdy dragon to the rescue here :)
Punched paper tape predates computers. By two centuries! And punched cards by more than 50 years. Both were used since 18th century to 'program' looms. Awesome pieces of engineering themselves, I'd say, after seeing some in Engels-Haus Museum in Wuppertal, Germany.

I knew about the use of punch cards to program looms. Cards are practically synonymous with early computer programming. The history of paper tape is a bit (pun intended) harder to track. Thanks so much for the added info.

Fascinating! I knew nothing about this until seeing your post, so many thanks for enlightening me! :)

Orcinus taught me something new about disk platters while commenting on my Disks Then and Now post. Seems we can all learn something from this old gear.

Was a time I did a fair amount of cross assembling on a PDP-11 with 1M ferrite core memory... though it was a bit dated I didn't have to fight others for time. And I worked on a robot for a while that used a "KD-11"--a PDP-11 implemented in LSI chips. I think it was basically 3 main chips that implemented the core.

I always hoped DEC would outlive IBM... determining point of death for IBM would be arguable! :)

BTW, paper tape on rolls was quite widely used to program NC (numerically controlled) machine tools, too. It hung on there for a long, long time, as machinists like to take things at their own pace.

Wow! Another fur who has worked on a PDP with core memory. Who'd have thunk it?

We used two PDP-11/70s for processing of experimental aircraft data. During certain kinds of tests, our programming staff was locked out to make sure the CPU could keep up without losing data. Operators did all of their work on LA-120 hardcopy terminals. We programmers got VT-100 video terminals (although a couple of us had to share).

I too, hoped DEC would outlast IBM. It made me sad to see them bought out by Compaq. Then Compaq was absorbed by HP. Neither of those companies really knew how to leverage DEC's strengths. I'm still (at least on paper) a member of the HP user community, but I miss the glory days of DEC and its associated user society, DECUS.

A last gasp for Digital... one of my employers tried to use the DEC Alpha "VAX on a chip" as master system controller for some products I worked on... figuring the engineers who were customers would actually trust a DEC product! Since it was 64 bit and we were still at 386 desktops (at best), it would have been a huge leap.

But its future became dubious before the product made it to market. When it did, it was with some shithole x86 chip, though I think it was at least AMD.

We were in the process of developing an in-house data acquisition system based on a DEC Alpha architecture. It would have replaced the high-dollar third party systems we were reliant on. The project was maybe 80-85% complete when my boss retired. His replacement canned the Alpha project. Now, 20 years later, we are about 95% done with an in-house data acquisition system to replace the high-dollar third party systems we rely on. Only this time, the project is PC based.

I love corporations... :)