Tapes and close to a quarter-century.

[Jerry Feldman]

On Friday 15 September 2006 5:32 pm, Jon maddog Hall wrote:

> I remember how odd it was to me that Unix simply put a "new-line"
> character at the end of every line, and did not have to pad the record
> with blanks.  In days of five megabyte disk drives (no screaming about
> how big that is, o.k.?) this was a big savings.
I worked as a progammer-analyst for the largest bank in South Florida where 
we were primarily a Burroughs shop, although we had an IBM 370. Burroughs 
installed new high speed tape units. There units were a slimline design 
with the take up reel behind the source reel. They were autoloading. 

we had some interesting problems with them.
First, you had to hold the reel on the hub until the hub locked (which the 
window was closing). 
On occasion, when the tape was released, it would go into a high speed 
rewind, unlock the hub, open the window and eject the tape. 
If the tape did not fully rewind, you had to manually rewind it with one 
hand. 

One day one of the units caught fire, and the computer operator grabbed the 
fire extinguisher and ran out of the building. They really hated those 
drives. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9