papertape repair tape or kit wanted

Rod Smallwood rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com
Mon Nov 30 05:22:11 CST 2015


Back inthe early 70's one of my jobs was to repair and set up 4K core 
stores for ICT 4100 systems.
The company I worked for were an off shoot of the big boat builders 
Camper & Nicholsons.

It was an all paper tape system (no cards). There were two readers, two 
punches and two keyboardless golfball typewriters.  I have forgotten 
exactly what types they were. I think the punch said something like  
BPRE on it and the readers did not match the rest of the system being 
painted a sort of PDP 8 Bezel white.

To test the repaired core stores I ran an Algol program that did the 
handicapping for sailing boats.
First you loaded the program (a reel of paper tape about three inches 
across.) I had a tape width wide perspex box with slots to put a pin 
through to locate the tape. . There was one switch to load and go. 
Centre was off, up loaded the tape to the start in the reader and down 
set it off. Boy was it quick! The tape shot through the reader and into 
a bin. Tape get tangled? Nope never did. At this point the printer would 
say Data? Of course you did not load the data tape. First you rewound 
the program tape so as not mix them up in the bin. My favorite trick was 
to grab the end of the tape before it got to the bin. The rewinder was 
just like a film rewinder.

Next up load the data tape and then wait about 10-15 mins for the output 
to appear on the printer.
Am I going to run a paper tape system on my 8/e Hell yes!!

Rod


On 30/11/2015 09:42, Dave Wade wrote:
>> I have a box of the repair material somewhere, but I suspect the
>> adhesive would be useless with the material.  Better to manufacture your
>> own with Williams suggestion, or a simpler one like mine.  BTW, we only
>> used this method with tapes to be read on an ASR33.  We didn't have high
>> speed machines.
>>
> I remember there being the remains of a pinch roller from the KDF9 high speed tape reader that had been destroyed by a bad join in a tape in University of Newcastle data prep room.
> There was also a warning to re-punch tapes for that reader......
>
>
>> You can use scotch tape sometimes on units with optical readers, and
>> dupe the tape from what you read if you need to have a copy w/o a break
>> in it.
>>
>> thanks
>> Jim



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