Punch Cards.

[Tom Horsley]

> We were the lucky ones in the second year.  We had a TI terminal that 
> had a cassette tape in it.  No more punch cards or paper tape for us.  :)

The Ocean Engineering department at FAU had a Data General Nova with
an ASR-33 TTY and paper tape reader, and I got to upgrade it with a
friend one weekend, installing the cassette device driver.

Unfortunately getting the cassette driver installed required reading
the whole kernel in via the paper tape reader - a roll about 3 inches
in diameter, and the slightest problem reading meant you had to start
from scratch again - what fun that was, being human strain relief
devices to keep all tension off the paper tape for the hours and hours
it took to finally get it to read the whole thing :-).

At least it had magnetic core memory, so once you got something in there, it
would stay there.