punched tape puncher

[neil_p]

Hello

Was clearing up the office today before a move and found a manual tape puncher in a leather box, looks almost brand new. Any idea when people stopped using these things, must be a fairly old piece of computer equipment !

[ahm]

A photo would be useful.

[neil_p]

OK, here is a picture, also no sure what the L shaped attachment would be for ?

[DKDeckmann]

Manually punching a tape would be a real PITA. While I suppose your find could be used for that, however it would not punch the tractor feed holes...

I think what you really have there is a splicing jig. I bet the bar on the left side of the screen pivots up and down and makes a nice straight cut... You prep a blank piece of paper tape or splicing tape, place it in the jig, add a little glue unless you used self adhesive splicing tape... Put the ends of your broken tape in butting up to one another... Close the thing, now use the punch to reperforate the spliced area so the data remains unchanged...

Obviously other tricks can be done like splicing different tapes together, making endless loops, etc...

Hello

Was clearing up the office today before a move and found a manual tape puncher in a leather box, looks almost brand new. Any idea when people stopped using these things, must be a fairly old piece of computer equipment !

[neil_p]

Sounds about right to me, the left hand bit pivots up and down and cuts paper like a mini guillotine. strange though, Our computer block was built in 1982, we recently cleared out a lot of the old mainframe system and there was no sign of any punched tape devices, just an old tape silo, tape hoppers and some huge old Unisys boxes.