In this age of smartphone zombification, it's hard to believe that there was once a time when most people had never seen or touched a computer. When I grew up in the 1970s, we didn't have a computer.

(1) A slow, low-capacity, sequential storage medium used on earlier computing and communications devices. Paper tape holds data as patterns of punched holes. (2) A paper roll printed by a calculator ...

Few schools had their own computers in the early 1970s - but by the end of the decade many began to invest in models such as the Elliott 903 The chances of walking into a UK school without any ...

Building a paper tape reader by itself isn’t super complicated: you need a source of light, some photoreceptors behind the tape to register the presence of holes and some way to pull the tape through ...

Since the dawn of computers, we’ve tried different ways to store data. These days, you grab data over the network, but you probably remember using optical disks, floppies, or, more recently, flash ...