Personalised paper tape

Thread Starter

Robin Mitchell

Joined Oct 25, 2009
819
Hi everyone,

Does anyone know of a manufacturer who could make me long strips of paper tape designed by me? (paper tape memory)

Many thanks
Robin

PS, is it also possible for it to be pre punched?
 

someonesdad

Joined Jul 7, 2009
1,583
Probably the easiest thing would be to see if you can find an old paper tape punch from an old 1970's or before computer or teletype machine. I wouldn't be surprised if a few geezers on this board in fact have some...

Why don't you explain what it is you're trying to do -- there may be better ways of doing it. OTOH, I remember discussing with other engineers in the 1990's the idea of using laser printers to put high-density information on the printed page to give a cheap storage method. As I recall, we estimated that on the order of 1 MByte could be stored on a page and, if you kept the paper in good shape, it could be read back into a computer with a scanner. We decided it was a silly idea from the business standpoint because of the continued areal density increases in magnetic recording.
 

Wendy

Joined Mar 24, 2008
23,415
Another scheme I kinda liked in the early days of computing, print bar code on regular paper. You could have reasonably large storage using a bar code scanner and a printer (any printer).

I worked around paper tape in the mid 80's early 90's, we spent a lot of money getting away from to hard disks. Basically a PDP11 was replaced with a 386 that emulated a PDP11, seems some kid out of college started a small business based on the conversion.

The paper tape booted the startup software, which in turn enabled the magnetic reel, which loaded the rest of the OS. The PDP was used to control an early pattern generator, the kind chip lithographic plates were made from.
 

tom66

Joined May 9, 2009
2,595
OTOH, I remember discussing with other engineers in the 1990's the idea of using laser printers to put high-density information on the printed page to give a cheap storage method. As I recall, we estimated that on the order of 1 MByte could be stored on a page and, if you kept the paper in good shape, it could be read back into a computer with a scanner. We decided it was a silly idea from the business standpoint because of the continued areal density increases in magnetic recording.
It exists! It's known as PaperBack. http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/index.html
 
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