I cut my IT teeth on things like an IBM 1401 and paper tape.. Tape was a pain in the butt, it was NOT fast , and was useless for transfer of large volumes of data. It was a good way to input data from teletype systems, though. High speed was considered to be around 24 to 30 inches of tape per second (which is between 240-300 characters per second). It was a real pain to handle , as you really needed to avoid tears, folds, and bends.
Punch cards and Unit Record stufff were even more fun. Chad made a great prank material, and you haven't lived unitl you were on the next to last pass of a multipass, multitray card sort on a high speed sorted, only to hear the dread sound of cards being shredded by the sorter, as a slight edge fold got hung up..
I can also remember the day when the company photographer was there to phtograph our "new" tape drives.. We poor operator types warned him, but the data centre manager told him to shoot. The flash triggered the EOT and rewind sensors, throwing drives from forward into fast stop/rewind, in the middle of production runs. (the old IBM drives used a reflective tape spot to mark the end of tape. The drive had a light beam and photocell that detected this)..
Or the joys of IBM 1403 line printers when the carriage control tape snapped, and ran away, spewing paper everywhere?
Ah the good old days..

Cheers
Harold