Hello all -
Real Men use punched paper tape to store programs and load the boot block, after toggling its binary location on the system console register :) The Gods Who Walk Among Us program in machine code by toggling it in at the console.
(I still have some punched paper tape somewhere. I remember feeling impressed when I graduated to punched cards. They didn't tend to crack if you had a string of all bits set to one.)
On the other hand, I did tens of thousands of lines of code on IBM punched cards and I never once recall a bug caused by a chad, hanging or otherwise.
Further to my previous post, we used to use punched paper tape as the absolute fall-back to boot the acquisition sytem (we didn't take disks to sea back then). We had a heck of a time keeping the tapes dry.... ;-) Hugh -- Radiator: the most portable, flexible and configurable RADIUS server anywhere. Available on *NIX, *BSD, Windows 95/98/2000, NT, MacOS X. - Nets: internetwork inventory and management - graphical, extensible, flexible with hardware, software, platform and database independence.