[GreenKeys] TAPE, PERFORATOR TTY TELETYPE MILITARY RADIO, 10 ROLLS - eBay...

[NNN7DXB at aol.com]

Larry:

All kidding aside, yes, there really was "other" than just yellow (or buff)
colored tape during the heyday of the teletype machine.

In the early and mid-60s, in the US Army, we generally had and used 
yellow tape. This was standard-issue stuff.

Sometimes however, we got pink tape. Same stuff, same supplier.

Other times, we got purple tape. Whole roles were either pink or purple,
again, depending on what was in the supply system at the time.
(On most yellow tape, the center cores were usually pink or purple to let
you know that you had reached the last 14 feet of tape, and that it was 
time
to replace the emptying tape reel with a new reel of tape).

In Germany, we received locally procured tape from a German vendor.
It was white, and had colored flowers on it. 

In Vietnam, we had black tape. Black tape was "dry" tape, in that it
was not oiled like all the other kinds of tape. The reason was that we
also, by then, were using UNIVAC 1004s and IBM 360-20 early computers
which were coming into regular use in the AUTODIN systems, and the
tape readers were actually photo-electric cells. Photo-electric cells 
didn't
like oiled tape, hence the unoiled, dry, black tape.

We used the black tape alongside the yellow or pink tape. Just had to
clean the photo-electric cells more often when using the yellow or pink,
since black was not a standard color for us.....

Also, tape did not necessarily, always, come in rolls. Sometimes, it came
fan-folded, in a box! That depended again on the supplier, but most often,
on the type of equipment it was being used on. The "box" was called a 
"tank"....


Dave F