[UK-CONTEST] GC4CC entry for RSGB Club Calls Contest

[Dave Sergeant]

On 26 Nov 2008 at 9:07, Andy Swiffin wrote:

> ahh yes, paper tape, my mum used to be able to read it...   
> seriously...  Part of her job at one time was manually reading the paper
> tape to verify the salary data that was on it.    And then there are
> cards of course - I may even have a card deck somewhere - my first Algol
> 60 programs went in on cards.

We used to use paper cards when I was at Uni (on an ICL 1300). When the 
student's union were organising one of their protests I and my friend 
Julian (at that time G3YOJ, not sure what happened to him) jokingly 
went up to the Maths block for a 'punch up'...

I well remember debugging Ferranti machine code programs by 
reading/correcting what was punched on paper tape - both 5 hole and 8 
hole. Almost as easy as copying RTTY by ear...

Surprised the original mail generated all these comments - my second PC 
and contest laptop have 3.5in floppy drives and I have an older machine 
which will read 5.25 ones (and a BBC-B as well). This machine also has 
a floppy but it don't work cos I blew up the driver chip on the 
motherboard. LOADS of floppy discs in both varieties. Just about 
remember 8 inch floppies with hard sectors. But nowhere do I have 
anything that can read all these fancy memory cards....

73 Dave G3YMC

http://www.davesergeant.com