Packrat or Archivist?

[Ric Werme]

A little chip whispered to Paul:
> Something tells me there's someone out there who has consolidated a bunch of:

>  - paper tape to punch cards
...
>  - CDs to DVD

> And they'll probably consolidate all [their] DVDs someday to something
> else.  Somewhere, someone has ENIAC or UNIVAC source code that's
> passed through all these media :)

Probably not.  The Eniac wasn't a stored program computer (and some that
were had banks of rotary switches to dial in prgram and data).  I think
paper tape got going in the late 1950s with the advent of drum based
systems, or perhaps delay line and CRT-based memories, since those were
non-persistant and easily corrupted.  There were even reel-to-reel based
paper tape readers, CMU's EE department was given an Athena, a drum based
military ballistics system with a couple of those.

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/eniac.html has an example of paper
programming instructions transferred to .gif, so it may have made to to DVD
by now.

A process control computer my father designed, the Bailey Meter 756, executed
off a drum, I programmed it by setting digital rotary switches and pressing
"write" for each location.  The last one may have been shut down in the 1990s,
the operators wrote programs in a spreadsheet and a macro reordered the
instructions to optimize rotational latency.  I only programmed the I/O
processor, I don't recall if programs could be read from paper tape.
Freiden Flexowriters were used, so it's certainly possible.

http://neil.franklin.ch/Usenet/alt.folklore.computers/20000717_Longest_running_computer
http://www.digitpress.com/faq/computerlist.txt

"The only thing worse than fanfold paper tape is non-fanfold paper tape."
(Bob Clements)  Anyone who has tried feeding rolled paper tape through one
of DEC's 330 cps readers would surely agree.

My Univac 1108 programming was done on punch cards, but by then we had core
memory and drums were relegated to temporary file storage.

	- Ric Werme