2.2. Tapes
Tape was an alternate long-term storage medium whereby the data created by a program could be stored for reuse by the same program or by other programs requiring the same data.
This was the golden age of sequential processing. For example, consider a program that ran daily to maintain customer information on a master customer list. The customer master file was kept on tape, and when the update program called for it, the tape was mounted on a tape drive—a read/write device the size of a refrigerator. The day’s changes (adds, changes, and deletes) might be on cards (the transaction deck) or tape (the transaction tape). When the program ran, new customers would be added, old customers deleted, and existing customer information changed ...
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