> Actually, I used a cassette recorder (Radio Shack/Pulsar).  I found paper
> tape to be too easily damaged, hard to get good working surplus
> punches/readers.

A friend of mine who worked on equipment of that era commented that he
used a papertape drive which--in "high speed" mode--could read about 1000
bytes/second (by comparison, a Commodore 1541 disk drive is generally
limitted to about 800 bytes/second).  Given that most of his files weren't
terribly big, the drive was more than adequately fast.  There was only one
problem.

If the speed controller for the drive hadn't warmed up yet (tubes--took
about 15-30 minutes to stabilize if I remember right) and the drive was
set to fast mode, the tape would be ripped to shreds.  Too bad they didn't
use a PIC to control the thing ;-)

Still, hole-punched paper does have a couple of advantages over other
media: [1] You can label the media directly in the writer; [2] You can
read paper tape by hand if necessary without any equipment.  Really not
that bad a technology for its time.