My first post-college job was with Control Data Corp, a computer manufacturer. At CDC’s computer school I had access to one of their small computers, the CDC 160-A. It served as a peripheral controller for CDC mainframe computer, the CDC 1604, to control magnetic tape drives, line printers, and Hollerith card readers and card punches.

The CDC 160-A was a neat little machine, built into a modified office desk:

www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/160/...l_Brochure_Nov62.pdf

A paper tape reader is seen at the right side of the desktop. A paper tape punch, not visible, is in the left desk drawer. A machine-language computer program could be entered into the computer via the central console which had four-digit octal displays, and four three-button sets right below to enter 12-bit program words of four octal digits. Also switches to start and stop the program. And a button to step through the program, one instruction at a time, for debugging.

After a program had been entered and debugged, it could be output to paper tape, after which it could be reloaded from the paper tape reader.

I spent many hours creating interesting (to me) programs on the CDC 160-A. Those were fun days!

Of course the processing power of my MacBook Air laptop is much greater than that of the CDC 160-A. Currently I’m having fun relearning an ancient baroque programming language, SNOBOL4. Ancient, but the best language ever for dealing with text. PERL is next-best, but it’s far behind.

In college I/we wrote our programs and recorded them with IBM cards.
To re-run the routine we just loaded the cards (or gave them to the "operator" on duty to run).
We also got a print out from the dot matrix printer.

When I was in Tech School in '68, the NC machines all had a paper tape reader on them. One of our classes had us "debug" a program by reading the tape by eye. That class was the last time I had to read tape!!!

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To re-run the routine we just loaded the cards

Ever drop the deck???? LOL Don't ask how I know!!!!

Yes. I used paper tape in college to feed the G-code program into a CNC mill. Fun times. Definitely beats cards. Can you imagine dropping a stack of cards and having to put them back in order?

When I was in College, late 1970's, I had a part time job at a Cardiology Clinic in OKC. They had recently purchased a Digital PDP15 (IIRC) computer Mainframe.

It was huge, took up most of a controlled room.

My job was to come in late afternoon, print out the next days paper tickets for the patients and to back up the computer. The disc drivers were HUGE, when they revolved the "fingers or arms" as they called them, flew over the disc platters. When one of those "crashed" it was a bad problem. I was instructed to call my boss immediately and he'd come in and grab a spare. IIRC we had 3 of those disc drive machines, 12 disc platters, and every evening I'd back up 3 of the 12, and rotate those 3 trios for backup purposes.

This was absolutely high tech in OKC in the late 1970's, and I loved it.

I didn't do any programming, my boss did that. I do recall the soft ware, it was named MIIS, Meditech Informative Information System, again IIRC.

We had a dumb terminal in the ER of the hospital across the street. Occasionally I had to carry a pager (remember pagers?) and if the ER could not connect I'd have to go over and see if I could get it going. Pretty heady stuff for a young college kid having ER Docs staring at me while I worked on it.

Anyway, after all that ramble, to start the mainframe PDP15 I had to insert a paper tape in the machine, run it through and that would start up the computer.

I remember using cards. Very mean to play 52 pickup back then. Kind of turned me off to programming. Visual Basic users today - no idea what the beginnings were like.

Yup. DEC PDP series machine. Somewhere, I have a Star Trek game on paper tape.

In the USN we had paper tape machines. Vacuum tube gear and Nixie Tube displays.

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four three-button sets right below to enter 12-bit program words of four octal digits

You'd get pretty good at entering the data quickly.

How about the large spools of magnetic tape? Remember the end of tape marker? The sound the thing made when it didn't have the End of Tape reflector and got to the end of the tape.

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Originally posted by smschulz:
In college I/we wrote our programs and recorded them with IBM cards.
To re-run the routine we just loaded the cards (or gave them to the "operator" on duty to run).
We also got a print out from the dot matrix printer.

That was my first computer class in college. Write out the program long hand, punch the cards, run the cards through the reader to program the computer (or to provide a diagnostic printout).

I remember it. I never used it for computer programming, though. Used it a lot for TTY, though.

About 1990-2000 had used this BTR device attached to a 386-16 PC to make and read NC programs (G-code) for a very old, but very accurate, WEDM machine.

https://youtu.be/wALFrUd6Ttw

From 1983-1987 I had used these old paper tapes to loadprograms into the NC Mills that I operated.

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Originally posted by odin:

quote:

To re-run the routine we just loaded the cards

Ever drop the deck???? LOL Don't ask how I know!!!!

IIRC the IBM cards had a section (optional) to punch in a card number, so after you dropped the deck you could get them back in the correct order.

Something like this?



...hooked up to a computer much like this:



...upon which I wrote my first programs back in high school in the early 70's.

I used to fix paper tape punches and readers along with teletype asr-33s. First job, at Pertec Computer Corp.

motor, where did you go to school?

High school, mid 70s, exact same teletype machine, but I believe it was hooked up to a PDP11, if this old memory serves.

Reading Senior High School, Reading PA.

I've seen the Univac computer at the Smithsonian museum, does that count? I'm of the AOL Spamming your mailbox generation, I had a state of the art 2400 baud modem.

A Player piano is an early version of that technology.

Never used tape but I have a lot of experience with cards. Wow, I'm older than dirt

Paper Tape= Dit Dot Bombs