The Paper Tape Project

The goal of the Paper Tape Project is to handle paper tapes handy with today's computers. Therefore we have written drivers for punching and reading with external devices, as well as a complete specialized hex editor for paper tape binary files. This project has produced a lot of tools, partly high quality, partly quick & dirty. It's an open source project – you can get the complete results, every single source file, as well as compiled binaries for Microsoft Windows and Linux. The development proceeds mainly at linux workstations, thanks to their great and powerful Unix shells.

The big final aim of the Paper Tape Project is to provide a complete program suite for viewing, editing, comparing, punching and reading in paper tapes on computers. After the project started with user space drivers that make PCs capable to communicate with paper tape readers and writers under various operating systems (GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows). Then I've written visualizing tools, using Cairo and GTK+. Afterwards I've written utilities to punch rendered text in various fonts on paper tapes. The final project is written in C++ and gtkmm.

Current state

Unfortunately, this project is - after all - in a quite bad state. There are plans to sort the code and get some of the old runnable releases back.

Further Reading

Since the website infrastructure is currently moving, you can read further information on the old homepage:

• ​Old Punched Paper Project Homepage
• ​Homepage of the Paper Tape Project (in old Homepage)
• ​Paper tape processing with contemporary computers (article on the technikum29 homepage)