In article <87k394mbwd.fsf@debian.uxu>, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote: > Robert Thorpe <rt@robertthorpeconsulting.com> writes: > > > In those days programs were punched onto cards using > > keypunches or punched onto paper tape. Sometimes > > they were written on paper and someone else would > > punch them in. In those early days editors were > > there to help people fix mistakes afterwards once a > > file existed on a tape or disk. Only later were they > > used for the whole writing process. > > OK, but then how did the data get on the tape/disk in > the first place? IIRC, Teletypes could be put into local mode, where what you typed was punched directly onto the paper tape. For punch cards, there were key punches -- they were essentially typewriters that punched onto cards instead of writing onto paper. The ASCII code for DEL is 127 because that was all the bits on a 7-column paper tape. So if you made a mistake while punching the tape, you could back up and press DEL, and it would punch all the holes in that row -- it was the paper-tape equivalent of White-Out. Applications that read text from paper tape would ignore that code. -- Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***
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