Paper Tape

Paper tape is a long strip of paper on which data is recorded as a pattern of punched holes, read mechanically or optically and used to store and input programs and data into telegraph and, later, computing equipment. The English inventor Alexander Bain used punched paper tape to control an automatic telegraph transmitter as early as 1846, and the format was later adapted for teleprinters and, in the twentieth century, for programming early computers and controlling numerically controlled machine tools. Paper tape was gradually displaced by punched cards and magnetic storage media as computing matured, though it remained in industrial and telecommunications use for decades afterward.