Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about
- Reference: 1749544209
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/06/10/retro_storage/
- Source link:
Paper tape, for example, can be prodigiously long-lasting. Unless, of course, it receives some unwanted attention.
"I did once open a box to find a moth had nested inside and feasted on the paper," recalled Andrew Herbert, chairman of trustees at the National Museum of Computing (TNMOC). The result was that the tape was too fragile to handle and essentially useless.
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Herbert's interest is in machines from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, and he has encountered a lot of software stored on punched paper tape. Wound loosely, there's a good chance the code can still be read. Wound tightly, it might get brittle. Folded, there's a chance it might split along the fold lines.
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That said, damage to a tape doesn't necessarily mean it's a write-off. "If there are tears or mispunched holes, then if the data format is known, it is often fairly easy to reconstruct the original, especially if there was parity or a checksum."
Delwyn Holroyd, a volunteer at TNMOC who leads the team that restored and maintains the marvellous 1950s [4]WITCH , also has experience with paper tape, which he warned does tend to deteriorate with use. "The WITCH paper tape readers use spring-loaded metal pins to sense the holes in the tape," he explained. "Over time, the pins wear through the tape, so we duplicate the working tapes every few months."
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Holroyd also works with punched cards, which he noted can last indefinitely in the right conditions. "The main challenge," he said, "is to avoid dropping a card deck and mixing up all the cards."
And then there's TNMOC's [6]ICL 2966 mainframe. Holroyd is all too familiar with the temperamental disks used by the machine. "The 2966 originally used exchangeable 80 MB and 200 MB disks where the heads fly above the surface of the disks on a cushion of air just a few microns deep, much smaller than dust or even smoke particles," he told The Register .
Any contamination could result in a head crash and a potential catastrophic failure. "They were never terribly reliable when new," he added, "so we have no chance of operating them at the museum without frequent disasters."
[7]Seagate still HAMRing away at the 100 TB disk drive decades later
[8]Backblaze denies 'sham accounting' claims as short sellers circle
[9]30 minutes to pwn town: Are speedy responses more important than backups for recovery?
[10]Even Google struggles to balance fast-but-pricey flash and cheap-but-slow hard disks
And magnetic tape? "Another problematic storage medium," said Holroyd. While not such a problem with older tapes, later ones (from the '70s and '80s) suffer from "sticky tape syndrome" when the binder used to glue the magnetic oxide to the plastic tape backing absorbs moisture, causing the tape layers to stick together.
"Attempting to play a sticky tape can tear off chunks of the oxide and cause irreversible data loss."
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The answer? "Bake the tape at around 50-60°C to drive the moisture out, although this is only a temporary solution. It takes many hours to treat the typical large open reel half-inch tapes used by mainframes and minis."
At the Centre for Computing History, Adrian Page-Mitchell reported challenges with 3.5-inch floppy disks, where brittle plastics and off-gassing can affect the media inside. Page-Mitchell also collects LaserDiscs, and told us that the disc rot phenomenon, where optical discs degrade over time and become unreadable, was highly manufacturer-dependent. He claimed that one well-known manufacturer's facility "was just not up to the job, and contaminants cause disc rot in those. Other ones, such as Pioneer, still play perfectly today, as their manufacturing was far more robust."
Page-Mitchell noted that some obsolete formats, such as HD-DVDs from another manufacturer, were rapidly failing, and certain types of CDs could no longer be read.
A challenge with storage is the longevity of the media and the availability of hardware capable of retrieving it. While paper tape and punch cards are long-lasting and can be read by enterprising enthusiasts of today, modern densely packed SSDs and spinning disks might present more of a challenge for the archivists of tomorrow. ®
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[4] https://www.tnmoc.org/witch
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[6] https://www.tnmoc.org/icl-2966
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/09/hamr_100_tb_drive_feature/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/29/backblaze_sham_accounting_claims/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/04/30_minutes_to_pwn_town/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/27/google_l4_storage_performance_improvements/
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[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Fascinating stuff
A friend from a former job worked down a salt mine in Wales with historic records. Mostly for medical products, where the permission to use is dependent on the original clinical trial data being available. If it stops being available in the original, then the drug management agency (I don't know what the UK one is called, this happened back in EU times) can revoke their consent and have it pulled from the shelves. He had paper notes going back to the 1930's and every generation of digital storage since. He was always on the hunt for old readers.
Charlie Stross speculated, in 'Greenhouse' that there will be a dark ages between the end of analogue records and the beginning of whatever permanent memory we settle on in the 21st century when few records remain for archaeologists. I don't disbelieve him.
A parallel problem
Knowledge, discourse, and broad culture, in the course of three decades, has become concentrated on the Internet. Some of this co-exists with the same information expressed in print on paper or on physical media such as film emulsion. An increasing amount of digitally stored information has never had a presence in a different format.
Thusly arrives the question of origin and establishing provenance. This matter pertains also in the context of historical research; as an example, the complete Oxford English Dictionary traces etymology; this depends upon the availability of relevant documents, and to a degree on their authenticity.
Digitally stored date/culture is malleable with respect to its content and to its attribution. Plagiarism, common enough in the analogue era, is rife in these times of 'cut and paste'; AI can produce convincing tracts drawn from numerous digital sources; also it sometimes adds fictitious information, e.g. non-existent judgements referenced in legal submissions.
The point being, digitally represented data possess all the problems - fragility of storage, unreliability of sources, and confabulation - found in traditional presentations, and some . All that before AI's contribution is considered.
A pressing difficulty is establishment of authenticity. This has to be in place at the time of release of data to other people. Perhaps, an extension of the currently silly usage of NFTs on a blockchain is required; the blockchain could record lines, and branches, of derivation from the original work. This requirement is entirely separate from issues of 'ownership' and monetisation of data.
Same plant that later made rotting CDs?
"Page-Mitchell also collects LaserDiscs, and told us that the disc rot phenomenon, where optical discs degrade over time and become unreadable, was highly manufacturer-dependent. He claimed that one well-known manufacturer's facility "was just not up to the job, and contaminants cause disc rot in those."
IIRC the PDO Blackburn plant that made most of the CDs that suffered 'bronzing' started as a LaserDisc plant before adapting the process to CDs. Was their process just as bad for LaserDiscs?
Memory Retrieval
Somewhere, in the attic, I have punched tapes from my early years at university. I had forgotten about them until this article. Now I don't know whether to seek them out; I won't be able to read them. Something else for my children to look skywards and roll their eyes.
Perhaps my grandchildren could make kite-tails from them: Cloud computing!
Old
I am old enough to remember that if we had paper tape that was going to be used a lot, like a boot tape, we had a mylar tape version as our work tape. I'd bet mylar tape is moth-proof.