@Cadbury_Moose @Dany I used paper tape readers in high school, they were attached to ancient teletype machines repurposed as terminals that printed on paper rather than video displays.
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@raganwald I have seen and been told of countless old monsters in machines. In 2023 at Swedens most prominent E-tech consumer outlet - when trying to buy a phone for mother - the salesrep shows me the screen. MS-DOS!!!
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@Dany I once had a customer who ran a specialized marketing agency, and he hired our firm to automate all kinds of business operations on the Macs they used.
In his office were two(‼️) NeXT cubes. He was also a musician, and there was some piece of software on them that had become intwined with his brain such that he treated those cubes like vintage instruments.
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The UK Post Office computers were originally LEO 3 machines (Lyons Electronic Office...) and when they eventually came to replace them IBM couldn't provide an emulator and suggested the original manufacturer (absorbed into ICL). ICL thought about it for a while and said "No Problem" and shipped (then modern) 2900-series mainframes with a custom instruction set. These were known by the Post Office as "Orange LEOs" because of the cabinet colour. 😁
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Dunlop's migration from two LEO 3s to an IBM System 360/50 (before my time) came as rather a shock to the operators when the overnight batch processing run finished in 20 minutes instead of 8 to 10 hours. 3:O)>
There was still ancient kit in use when I was there in the 1970s though: an Elliot paper tape punch driven by a rack-full of "Norlog" (discrete DTL logic blocks potted in epoxy) boards for the data link from the Speke (Liverpool) factory. 😱
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@Cadbury_Moose @Dany I used paper tape readers in high school, they were attached to ancient teletype machines repurposed as terminals that printed on paper rather than video displays.
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This was a "high-speed" punch on the end of a landline to Liverpool. The link used GPO modems that were about 15" square and 8" high for a frighteningly fast 300 Baud. (Analogue modem built from transistors, polyester caps and ferrite-core inductors!)
The tapes were read on an IBM 2671 optical reader about the size of a washing machine, which frequently disappeared behind a mountain of unspooled tape as the night shift progressed. 3:O)>
<Sigh.> Nostalgia...
@raganwald Bike-shedding.
@Dany Precisely!
As the late Phil Karlton observed, naming things is one of the two hardest problems in Computer Science, and names tend to persist and spread through a code base.
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@raganwald Yes, i know that one. I useually say "naming thing and parallellism". Though all thing multitheaded are easier.