What Does Paper Tape Mean?
Paper tape is a slow, low-capacity, sequential medium for data storage that was used on early communications and computing devices. The paper tape holds data as patterns of punched holes with data being represented by the absence or presence of holes at specific positions. The data was written and stored using special tape reading and writing systems. It was widely used during the early twentieth century for teleprinter communication as well as in the computing world in the 1950s and 1960s. Paper tape is largely obsolete now.
Techopedia Explains Paper Tape
Paper tape was a long strip of paper in which holes were punched, in order to store data. Paper tape was usually 0.1 mm thick and the hole spacing was 2.54 mm in both directions of the tape. Some paper tapes had predefined mechanical, electrical and optical properties, so that they could be used in all environments. The movement of the tape with respect to the data was usually marked on the paper tape. Data on the paper tape can be encoded by several techniques. Many standards were used for encoding, such as:
