Software for OCR'ing paper tape?

Running a paper tape based system. In the early 1970's I worked for a company called C&N Electrical based near where I lived (and still do live) in Newbury UK. They were a division of Camper & Nicholson a boat building company. (They made beautiful wooden yachts.) Anyway the bit I worked for did a large range of electronic subcontract work. They had a contract to test and repair core store memory units from computer systems made by a UK manufacturer called Elliot Automation. The test computer system was made up of two or three racks, not 19" but more like the wide lateral filing cupboards you see in offices. There was what I would call an I/O station that had two high speed tape readers, two tape punches and two IBM Golf ball typewriters without keyboards. Guess who got the job of testing and repairing the memory units? The memory themselves consisted of a unit about three feet long, twelve inches high and six inches deep. At either end were plug in PCB's and in the middle the core stack in a sealed box. These were made by a then well known company called Mullard. I think (forty years is long time) they were 4k each. I would take a unit, stick it on the bench, put some long cables on it and connect it in the place of one of the good memory units in the rack. I had a test tape that would load via one of the readers. The tape was rolled up into a spool, you put that on a feed unit (a metal pin in a lump of wood), the end of the tape then went into the reader. There was a tape load switch that fed the tape to the start position. Then you flipped the system load switch and the tape read into the system. Finally you hit the system run switch and the program would start. Once through the reader the loose tape was caught in a large box. I would then fish out the start of the tape and rewind it with a manual movie film rewinder The program once loaded read and wrote the store with known patterns and you could diagnose or set up the store read/write electronics (lots of OC71 and OC81 transistors) After repairing or setting up the unit I ran a confidence test which consisted of a program designed to calculate the handicaps for large yacht racing. You loaded the program tape and then a data tape. The output printed on one of the golf ball RO typewriters. ? Rod Smallwood ? ? -----Original Message----- From: cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of ben Sent: 25 May 2012 21:49 To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Software for OCR'ing paper tape? On 5/25/2012 12:52 PM, Tony Duell wrote: That is a Pre-555 timer era, you don't expect to have paper tape back then. The Colossus has the fastest paper taper reader out there I expect. Ben. BTW... I love the paper tape quote but I can't find it at the moment about any faster reading and you got sticky bits of paper tape all over the place.