These days, data is as likely as not to be “in the cloud.” Otherwise, it’s probably on a USB flash drive or SD card. But in the old days, paper tape was a widespread way to store and retrieve data. A ...

In this age of smartphone zombification, it's hard to believe that there was once a time when most people had never seen or touched a computer. When I grew up in the 1970s, we didn't have a computer.

Building a paper tape reader by itself isn’t super complicated: you need a source of light, some photoreceptors behind the tape to register the presence of holes and some way to pull the tape through ...