I absolutely love punched tape. OK so the data density sucks, but most hugeness today (most, not all!) is simply bloat. Internetworking exists today because the world developed, collectively, sufficient richness and complexity, and therefore the robustness, necessary to support a truly large system. Microsoft WORD is large because it is a HUGE BLOATED PIECE OF SHIT; but TCP/IP is huge because it is a collection of thousands of pieces of work, conforming to an external abstract design ("standard"), each tested and it's very existence justified by thousands of other designers and users. It's the collective, accumulated work of thousands of people over decades of time. It's not all good, just most of it.

Anyways, punched tape is tangible, understandable by nearly anyone after a five minute conversation, both human and machine readable, and compatible with human senses -- eg. it's tangible. You can feel it, spool it in your hand, hear it move through the reader, sense the oneness with physical reality and the abstract data, etc. And it also provides historic continuity, something many people never consider; it's roots are in the original electric communications network, telegraphy. Also, it's byte- and bit-serial nature is an intentional synergy with Alan Turing's "universal machine" and some of the physical embodiments of it, such as his Bletchley Park work and most early post-war computers.

And physically, reading tape is a simple linear operation, the mechanisms are easy to use, and can have as little as one moving part (in the 70's there was a hobbiest tape reader that had NO moving parts; you pulled the tape through it by hand!).

Nearly forgotten today is the fact that computers don't store numbers or bytes, but symbols. And symbol mapping is what ASCII, character sets, languages, writing, speech, text and holes on paper tape are all about. The Story Teller series of devices, at least, are about symbol mappings, the meaning of words, letters, and symbols, in and out of context, and tape is a perfect analogy. Don't you, at some animal level, feel that that little flat metal thing, claiming to be a "one gigabyte disk drive", is somehow fake?

Of course anyone who has had the pleasure of rewinding a tangled, looped, torn and worn tape of their assembler or compiler after a half-hour's load won't mind the lack of tangibility.

For my projects, the symbols I put on the tape are interpreted by smart devices, so there is an inherently high level of data "compression", so in the WPS world paper tape is quite nice.