1 Mar
2026
1 Mar
'26
12:56 p.m.
Fan fold tape was used in DEC PC05 readers and suchlike see eg
https://retrocmp.com/stories/dec-pc05-papertape/242-dec-pc05-working-with-p…
Any DEC diagnostic, of the PT era, I have ever seen was issued on fan fold - much of
DEC's PT oeuvre is available online
I have fond recollections of using fan fold diagnostics etc etc on a DG Nova 2. Always
looking for bad memory ... Found it all too often.
Great technology until it spills, then you have to re-fold it by hand ...
Personally, I have always prefered the dump in dustbin (literally), respool on hand winder
technology.
Many hours spent plotting mainframe generated tapes on Nova - BC "before comms",
ie < ~ 1980
Martin
-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Lewis via cctalk [mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org]
Sent: 01 March 2026 20:36
To: Kevin McQuiggin <mcquiggi(a)sfu.ca>
Cc: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>rg>; Steve
Lewis <lewissa78(a)gmail.com>
Subject: [cctalk] Re: Operating system, on punch cards?
That's a great story Kevin! That'd be a photo I'd be interested in seeing, of
those cards (or if they're in some museum archives somewhere). Or in some abandoned
IBM warehouse.
I'm just trying to envision the workflow (since certainly I "wasn't
there"
in the 60's). There is a diagram in early editions of Operating Systems
Concepts, that shows a deck of punch cards - showing they contain CODE and DATA.
You'd have to load the FORTRAN compiler itself, insert a control card to invoke the
compiler, and then another control card to RUN your
compiled code. Translating that to modern workflow, I view it as like
loading the "runtime library" of your compiled code (the "little
things"
like math across multiple words, or interacting with whatever I/O devices were available).
Also thanks Donald, neat link on punch cards, I hadn't come across that.
So whose got a similar thing for punched tape? (can we call it "fan tape"
or is that a separate category altogether?)
-Steve
On Sun, Mar 1, 2026 at 2:04 PM Kevin McQuiggin <mcquiggi(a)sfu.ca> wrote:
Hi All:
My comments, worth two cents or less.
The first computer I ever used was an IBM 1130 my city’s school
district office at when I was a 14-year-old high school student. This was in 1974.
My exploration of the “IBM Disk Monitor System" on the machine led to
me clobbering the FORTRAN compiler on the removable hard disk by
mistake one evening. The disk had a form factor similar to the DEC RK05.
Staff discovered the problem the next morning and had to reload the
compiler from punched cards. They told me that they restored the
entire system disk (OS and FORTRAN) rather than just the compiler. I
saw the ~5 drawers of punched cards that they used for this. I was
mortified at my mistake and expected that I was in BIG trouble.
Apparently the restore took most of the day.
In this case it looks like the OS was held as backup on cards. It was
a small installation and there were no peripherals other than a card
reader and the integrated system console.
In bigger installations I agree, magtape was probably the standard media.
Postscript: don’t submit a DUP job:
// XEQ DUP
*DEFINE VOID FORTRAN
on an 1130. This does NOT give you examples of invalid FORTRAN code
or errors, as my young mind surmised, but deletes the FORTRAN compiler.
I got in trouble, but it wasn’t serious as I made an honest error,
driven by curiosity.
Kevin
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.
On Mar 1, 2026, at 11:47 AM, Paul Koning via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> 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
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