These days, data is as likely as not to be “in the cloud.” Otherwise, it’s probably on a USB flash drive or SD card. But in the old days, paper tape was a widespread way to store and retrieve data. A ...

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 ...

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 ...