In this age of smartphone zombification, it's hard to believe that there was once a time when most people had never seen or touched a computer. When I grew up in the 1970s, we didn't have a computer.

Building a paper tape reader by itself isn’t super complicated: you need a source of light, some photoreceptors behind the tape to register the presence of holes and some way to pull the tape through ...

After previously working out a suitable approach to create a period-correct paper tape reader for his tube-based, MC14500B processor-inspired computer, [David Lovett] over at the Usagi Electric farm ...

Few schools had their own computers in the early 1970s - but by the end of the decade many began to invest in models such as the Elliott 903 The chances of walking into a UK school without any ...

1955: Computer pioneer Doug Ross demonstrates the Director tape for MIT’s Whirlwind machine. It's a new idea: a permanent set of instructions on how the computer should operate. Six years in the ...

(1) A slow, low-capacity, sequential storage medium used on earlier computing and communications devices. Paper tape holds data as patterns of punched holes. (2) A paper roll printed by a calculator ...