Paper tape...

Paper tape...  This article brought back all sorts of memories for me.  Several of the earliest computers I built (back in the mid- to late-'70s) used paper tape as their only non-volatile memory.  I started with a baudot teletypewriter (a Teletype Model 28 ASR) jointly purchased with a friend that we named “Ralph”.  When I got tired of waiting several hours for a long tape to load, I built an optical tape reader that could read a couple hundred characters per second – a huge advance.  My little hobby area had a large number of paper tape rolls, each containing the object code of a program or the text source code.

Hobby computing was just a bit different back in those days!  Not better, just different.  In some ways it was more exciting, because all of us participating in the hobby had the sense that we were oddballs on the fringe of something growing.  We really had no sense at all for how big and important these little computers would become – we were just having fun pushing the envelope of what was possible...