Paper tape reader
A device that reads data from the pattern of holes in a paper strip — the punch card reader's cousin for a continuous roll.
Paper tape carried five to eight hole tracks per row and was read either mechanically with pins or — faster and gentler — optically with photocells behind the strip. The reader was standard kit on the teletype and on early minicomputers: a PDP-8 or PDP-11 often booted by having a fast photoelectric reader pull bootstrap code off a tape. Mechanical readers managed tens of characters a second, photoelectric ones thousands. Tape was cheap and easy to correct — you cut and spliced it — but fragile and slow to search, and it vanished as magnetic tape and disk took over storage in the 1970s.