Interesting! The only "heavy use" approach to paper tape I have seen is the use of mylar tape instead of paper. OS boot tapes might be punched on that. My father had a machine in his lab (precision measurement lab) in which a tape of correction data was used. That was punched on mylar. I think there are two variants of mylar tape: mylar sandwiched with paper, which looks much like plain paper tape, and simple mylar alone. The latter often comes metallized on one side, and is glossy. The metallization I suspect is for reliable optical reading, to avoid problems with the mylar alone being too translucent. Optical readers are pretty gentle in their tape handling even at high speed, at least if they can avoid starting and stopping. At TU Eindhoven, where paper tape was the exclusive input medium for the university mainframe computer (Electrologica X8), they used optical readers rated at 2000 characters per second. These could start and stop very quickly but in normal use were spooled to drum so they were moving all the time. The input side would be a roll; on the way out of the reader the tape would drop into a bucket from which it could be rewound with a separate tape winder. I don't remember if the X8 tape reader could stop between characters. I know the X1 reader (1000 cps I think) could do so, which is quite an amazing mechanical accomplishment. paul