12 Hole Paper Tape - CSIRAC Computer, Interprogram Initial Tape, T760, 1959

Summary

Paper tape, part of a collection of paper tape programs and sub-routines used for input to CSIRAC. This is a program tape.

The collection includes the original University of Melbourne Computation Laboratory Paper Tape Library of 12 hole tapes of subroutines and programs, and program and data tapes from staff and outside users.
Most of the paper tapes were 12-track punched paper tapes. 5 hole paper tapes were used primarily for data input and output rather than program input. However, 5 hole program tapes could be produced by using Interprogram, an English language programming system rather than using machine language.

Each tape has a 'T' number. The Computation Laboratory Paper Tape Library consisted of tapes with a tape number less than 700. There were not 700 tapes but the number 700 was arbitrarily chosen to separate the Computation Laboratory Library tapes from user tapes.

Details of this tape:
Interprogram 1 Dec 1959
Further information may be found in the headers of either the .CVT or .TSP files.

The Interprogram tapes, HT 13509.191 and HT 13509.314 to HT 13509.322 inclusive, were created by Dr. G. W. Hill. These were a very important development. Interprogram was a programming system using the English language. The University of Melbourne and many others were users. Most of these tapes are in poor condition, torn, patched and most of them will not run as a consequence of this. The exceptions are HT 13509.314 (T754) and HT 13509.315 (T755). HT 13509.314 was almost immediately readable, and is fully documented in G.W. Hill's Ph.D thesis, but it took a lot of work by Ron Bowles and John Spencer to make HT 13509.315 workable. These are the only two of the 8 programs which can be run. Their .tsp files are fully annotated, unlike for most other programs. John Spencer said (March 2009) "that it was too much work for us to be able to make the rest of them run, and maybe we couldn't have done so anyway".