The paper punch saw wide use in two areas I have some experience with.
Amazingly, I handled paper tape punch stuff until the very early 00's!
I actually love paper tape. It is just fun, and it features an actual bit bucket with punched out bits in it! Good for all manner of work place tomfoolery, but I digress.
Tapes were typically read up to about 9600 baud (fast), with most at half that or less. Punching was 1200 tops if you cared about your gear and uses the black paper tape infused with lubricants.
The most common in manufacturing was Gcode punched to tape as 7 bit ASCII. Most punches could do 8 bits, so it also saw use as file storage, say master data read in to generate specific machine data.
One example I can cite was sheet metal CNC punch programming on a Tek storage tube computer. The application was read from tape and had various modules. Edit, backplot, generate gcode from master, archive, etc...
User would input tool lists and source gcode. That got written to paper tape much like a floppy drive would be used. Then it could be used to generate an actual gcode tape for a real machine. Load the backplotter, then feed it a tool list from paper tape and then the long program tape.
Being a storage tube, the system would simply draw all the tool punches to the screen so the programmer could see the result, correct errors and such. This was a lot more robust than one might imagine. The Tektronix model I used had a 1024x1024 vector space. Some of those could do 4k vector spaces on a large tube. Manage brightness, and it was pretty much effective resolution.
Then take the finished tape to the machine! Really old ones had no program memory, so they literally read the same tape, formed into a loop, over and over to make parts.
Newer ones would read it into their program memory and run from there.
Amazingly, I handled paper tape punch stuff until the very early 00's!
I actually love paper tape. It is just fun, and it features an actual bit bucket with punched out bits in it! Good for all manner of work place tomfoolery, but I digress.
Tapes were typically read up to about 9600 baud (fast), with most at half that or less. Punching was 1200 tops if you cared about your gear and uses the black paper tape infused with lubricants.
The most common in manufacturing was Gcode punched to tape as 7 bit ASCII. Most punches could do 8 bits, so it also saw use as file storage, say master data read in to generate specific machine data.
One example I can cite was sheet metal CNC punch programming on a Tek storage tube computer. The application was read from tape and had various modules. Edit, backplot, generate gcode from master, archive, etc...
User would input tool lists and source gcode. That got written to paper tape much like a floppy drive would be used. Then it could be used to generate an actual gcode tape for a real machine. Load the backplotter, then feed it a tool list from paper tape and then the long program tape.
Being a storage tube, the system would simply draw all the tool punches to the screen so the programmer could see the result, correct errors and such. This was a lot more robust than one might imagine. The Tektronix model I used had a 1024x1024 vector space. Some of those could do 4k vector spaces on a large tube. Manage brightness, and it was pretty much effective resolution.
Then take the finished tape to the machine! Really old ones had no program memory, so they literally read the same tape, formed into a loop, over and over to make parts.
Newer ones would read it into their program memory and run from there.