1 Mar
2026
1 Mar
'26
12:18 p.m.
Well, ok, punch tape or paper tape is kind of "same difference" to me --
meaning, it wasn't mag tape nor disk pack (for the earliest "proto"
operating systems). [ but yes I realize the speed and workflow of punch
vs tape is quite different ]
And fair point, maybe IBM's lineage was the punch tape route (for CTSS),
other (early OS software) maybe more likely using paper tape (Burroughs
AOSP, CDC's SCOPE, and GE-645 with MULTICS).
I've seen OS's loaded from vinyl records and reel-to-reel, just never
imaged one being loaded from any kind of paper. :) But as far as I can
tell, CTSS and Atlas Supervisor were probably "single digit
installations". The first widely-deployed OS possibly was possibly CDC's
scope (meaning, more than a few hundred installations). Even MULTICS had a
fairly limited install base (as far as I can determine).
-Steve
.
On Sun, Mar 1, 2026 at 1:47 PM Paul Koning <paulkoning(a)comcast.net> wrote:
On Mar 1, 2026, at 2:34 AM, Steve Lewis via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
...
Anyway, apologies - it was just something that only recently occurred to
me, that basically all of the original operating systems originated on
punch cards: CTSS, Supervisor, AOSP, SCOPE, even MULTICs.
That's certainly not true. It may be true for card-centric outfits like
IBM. I don't know what early DEC development looked like, but considering
the rarity of card handling equipment on DEC systems I would expect paper
tape.
Early software for the Dutch machines I know was done on paper tape. In
some cases that involved punch equipment with custom-designed coding; for
example, the Electrologica X1 had a rudimentary assembler in ROM (along
with a BIOS) and source text was given to it on 5-channel paper tape, in a
code slightly above straight binary machine language.
Its successor the X8 had paper tape I/O standard, and the standard
executable file loaders used paper tapes. Ditto the bootstrap. The famous
THE operating system was a paper tape batch system, with the OS image
supplied on tape (though I think at some point it was moved to magtape for
faster startup). No punched cards were seen there until the X8 was
replaced by a Burroughs 6800, circa 1974, and even that machine had paper
tape input to support all the applications that had the input data on paper
tape. My father's precision measurement lab (part of the ME department)
had instruments that punched the measurements onto paper tape, for later
processing by that central computer system. All that was in ALGOL, by the
way.
paul