Back before the days of 8 inch floppy disks, storing computer programs was much much more primitive than even a stack of punch cards. The earliest general function computers utilized paper tape, a strip of paper with punched holes designating a 0 or a 1. Thankfully for the computer scientists of the day, these paper tapes weren’t produced by hand. No, the Friden SP-2 tape punch took care of the responsibilities of punching holes in these tapes. When [Max] rescued one of these tape punch machines from a trash bin, he understood what he needed to do: link it to an Arduino so he might produce his own paper tapes.
[Max] discovered a veroboard with a lot of transistors inside the device that was added by a previous owner. After discovering the manual for the device he linked it to an Arduino, holding each of the eight manage pins high to punch the tape, as well as then holding one more pin high to advancement the tape. With this, he was able to punch letters instead of binary code into his paper tape.
[Max] likewise added an Ethernet shield to his Arduino that checks his email. If an email shows up in a special folder, it outputs the subject line to the tape punch machine, providing him an completely vintage ticker tape machine, developed with vintage 60s hardware.
There are a pair of videos of [Max]’s tape punch device in action below, together with a gallery of the attractive gut shots of this amazing machine.