Punched paper tape

Punched tape or perforated paper tape is a form of data storage, consisting of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched to store data. Now effectively obsolete, it was widely used during much of the twentieth century for teleprinter communication, for input to computers of the 1950s and 1960s, and later as a storage medium for minicomputers and CNC machine tools.

Paper tapes constructed from punched cards were widely used throughout the 19th century for controlling looms. Perforated paper tapes were first used by Basile Bouchon in 1725 to control looms. However, the paper tapes were expensive to create, fragile, and difficult to repair. By 1801 Joseph Marie Jacquard had developed machines to create paper tapes by tying punched cards in a sequence. The resulting paper tape, also called a "chain of cards", was stronger and simpler both to create and to repair. (See Jacquard loom).

This led to the concept of communicating data not as a stream of individual cards, but one "continuous card", or a tape. Many professional embroidery operations still refer to those individuals who create the designs and machine patterns as "punchers", even though punched cards and paper tape were eventually phased out, after many years of use, in the 1990s.

In 1846, Alexander Bain used punched tape to send telegrams.

In 1857 Charles Wheatstone used paper tape for the preparation, storage and transmission of data.

In 1880s, Tolbert Lanston invented the Monotype System, which consisted of a keyboard (typesetting machine) and a composition caster. The tape, punched with the keyboard, was later read by the caster, which produced lead type according to the combinations of holes in 0, one or more of 31 positions. The tape reader used compressed air, which passed through the holes and was directed into certain mechanisms of the caster. The system went into commercial use in 1897 and was in production well into the 1970s, undergoing several changes along the way.

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