[PLUG] Terabyte paper tape

Atharva Lele itsatharva at gmail.com
Wed Sep 22 15:34:40 UTC 2021


Hello,

Reading all of this is really so interesting to me! I was born in 1998 and
I feel like I've missed out on so much!

My first computer was an Intel Pentium 4 with 256MB RAM and 40GB HDD.
Hopefully I'll get to at least tinker with some of the old tech!

Regards,
Atharva Lele


On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 11:43 AM Daniel Ortiz <elamigodanielortiz at gmail.com>
wrote:

> If it is desired or decided to try to replicate the experience of paper
> tape coding then theoretically Google's teachable machine could be one
> component used to accomplish that:
> https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com
>
> On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 11:02 AM Russell Senior <russell at personaltelco.net
> >
> wrote:
>
> > You can still get the clack-clack-ding-ding without the hardware:
> >
> >   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd5oomwEBb0
> >
> > but it's hard to replicate the smell of paper tape.
> >
> > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 4:08 AM Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > "My first computer" was a DEC PDP8 at Tektronix, which I
> > > was allowed to use at age 16 in 1969.  The programming was
> > > language was FOCAL.  No disk drive - I/O was an ASR-33
> > > teletype, and a "high speed" 60 character-per-second paper
> > > tape reader.
> > >
> > > I compare that to my new 80 gram, 1 Terabyte SATA3 solid
> > > state drive.  A terabyte of paper tape would fill a cube
> > > 20 meters on a side, weigh more than 10,000 metric tonnes,
> > > and take 530 years to read.
> > >
> > > Not all was bad back then.  The lawns we kids were told
> > > to get off of were larger.
> > >
> > > Keith
> > >
> > > --
> > > Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com
> >
>



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