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9-Track Open Reel Tape Production Ends This Year
Robogeek writes: "eMag, the last maker of 9-track open-reel tapes, has announced that it will cease production of the product in 2002. The full story is here. The end of an era. We just packed up and shipped off our last 9-track mainframe drive for scrap. The thing was the size of a refrigerator, but when we had a bank of 9 of them going full-blast it sure gave the place a cool sci-fi feel. No more spin-spin, whir-whir... (sigh)
'Please stop, Dave. My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it ...'"
Ever load a 9 track mag tape?
I was actually using one in 1994, mailing houses apparently bought address lists on 9 track tape.
Seriously, they still make those? Well not now I guess. Has anybody ever used one? I sure haven't, but I've only been working with computers for 15 years or so.
~ now you know
Just after I bought a 9-track player for my car!
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
In the mid-80s, 9-track tape was pretty much the standard medium used to archive data. That's what Henry Spencer used, for example, to save the Usenet traffic of the 80s. I wonder how much history will be lost as all these tapes become unreadable.
Now the PDP-8 in my Basement with 9-Track tape is gonna become a valuable antique (har!) Ah, well...
I keep hoping...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I remember having to use cotton swabs and alcohol to clean the heads of those things every few days. Other than that, they were pretty sturdy. I can't think of one 8mm drive that has lasted as long as one of our recently retired 9-track machines did.
They don't make 'em as they used to anymore, son.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. -Ayn Rand
I even remember older 7 track tapes, and going from 1600 bpi (bits per inch) to 6250 bpi. I may still have a copy of my Masters' thesis lying around on one (in a proprietary mark-up format: Formal (Hi AJWM!)). Fat lot of good it does.
You could've hired me.
Oops.. 9 track. I thought it was 8 track! I was worried about what I was going to do with my great 70's classic rock. The 8 track still works great in my Pinto with a speaker in front and a speaker in back. Don't scare us like that next time!
-- Remember Johnny,
Wow, 9-track tapes. That takes me back. I remember getting a job at Motorola when I got out of school, back in '93. I thought 9-track tapes were old THEN. I am actually surprised that it took this long for them to stop being produced. What a cumbersome mess. I got pretty good at spooling them up though. It is amazing how far we have come since then as far as portable storage goes. But then again, I have more memory on my machine than my first computer had in hard drive space. (by a long shot)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I have a room full of them! They're for historical purposes, but up until 4 months ago, one customer still sent us data pulls from their mainframe on them. I'm *STILL* in the process of archiving the remaining reel tapes onto Mammoth-2 cartridges.
Some people take their .sig way too seriously
We've got customers still sending us data on 9-track. Guess they'll be stocking up!
With the 20th Anniversary release of Tron on DVD, we can look back longingly on the days when one could slip through a major computer facility and evade the security guards by hiding behind the banks of 9 track tape machines and disk platters.
*sigh*
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I have a bunch of old 9-track tapes that have potentially useful data on them. I guess I had better get moving on converting them to something more readable. Now I need to find somebody with a 9-track tape drive!
On topic: I can recall using magnetic powder sprinkled on tapes to see where the block gaps were. Then you could use a ruler to measure the size of the blocks, and convert to byte (by multiplying by the density). This gave you a head start in getting the JCL DD statement right for the tape. FB/80/800!
I used these tapes as far back as 1996. We finally got rid of the last two units we had when our system (a custom-built satellite telemmetry station) was upgraded to DAT.
Funny thing is that the DAT decks were not more reliable than the old tape drives they replaced. Much faster and less annoying, sure, but no better in terms of reliability.
We still kept another tape drive, that one seemed to be at least 12" in diameter. It was hell to mount because both spools mounted on a bayonet mount coaxially!
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Irwin Allen's "Time Tunnel" would have been a more appropriate shtick for big old tape drives than Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" but thanks for the chuckle. The Time Tunnel's giant, multi-storeyed cavern of spinning tapes and blinking lights with scores of techs running around with clipboards in their white lab coats was enough to get me past the lame scripts (none of which I remember). Back to the real discussions.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
I guess now I can finally convince my boss to let me upgrade our IT Department
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
Back when I was about 12 my dad brought one of the tapes home from work and I unwound it all through the house for hours. Mom wasn't too thrilled and made me clean it up. But it sure was fun...
Dozings.com -- Its kinda funny... If you're as crazy as me.
Hm, this story again.
Aren't these guys still making their own tapes?
Now if we could just get rid of floppies it would be a perfect world.
I hope you offloaded all the ASCII pr0n before trashing your tapes.
Trolling is a art,
didn't HAL store things on those funky glass-like blocks, anyway? It's been a while since I saw 2001
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Now's the time to invest in the christmas light and plasterboard companies
"Old man yells at systemd"
Tape Librarians Will Mount Anything
I can see the fnords!
Imagine if those folks had waited another year or two before recovering those tapes ...
Now where will I get a replacment copy of KC and the SunShine Band..... Oh wait, 9 track? Never mind then.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I havent seen one of those in use for years. I thought they were just used for getting old data for posteritys sake and not commercialy anymore. O well i guess im wrong
Lots of used tapes will be dumped on the market cheap that I can use in my VCR! Seriously! No really!
That stuff was allways 2x better than the best 'high-quality' tape you could buy. It was winding it up that took the most time.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I love 9-track tapes: it makes me feel like I'm a member of the old school when using them. Back in college, every other month, I'd stop by my University's mainframe center. They had a stack of retired 9-tracks there that said "Take One", and I'd help myself. I actually backed up some of my old mail onto one of them, using the CS department's old drive. But one day, my life changed. Someone told me that 9-track tapes are made with Kevlar: that's some tough-ass stuff, it is. My job was clear.
At the time, I was living on the 4th (top) floor of a U-shaped dorm, with about 100 feet between the "prongs". I lived at one edge, and as luck would have it, my best friend lived in the other prong. So, of course, we decided that we needed a tape wire running over the street from my window to his. 9-track should be perfect, right? After all, we did have about 6000 feet of it. And it's so strong and light. What could go wrong?
I gave my friend one reel, and I kept the other. 3AM on a Tuesday arrives. Our third accomplice, a friend of ours named Zaki, goes down to the street. My friend and I, in our windows, unreel enough tape that it reaches the ground, where Zaki grabs one end, hauls it over to the other end, and ties them together. My friend starts pulling up, and the tape began to rise ever so majectically over the street. It was a beautiful site.... until....
"What are you doing?" a cop's voice suddenly boomed, approaching Zaki, who was helplessly watching the tape rise above his head.
"Uh... just, uh.. running a little tape wire here, sir," he said, with surprising sincerity. The wire was now about at the level of the 3rd floor as my friend continued reeling it in.
"And what are you going to do when that falls, and hits someone in the head?" the cop inquired. Though not as politely as this text might suggest.
As if on cue, the tape became taut -- my friend had reeled in his side completely. It was at that moment that I realized that Zaki's tape attachment skills should not have been trusted. (After all, I'm the one who owns the Ashley Book of Knots - it should have been my job.) Yes, that's right: the tape came apart. My friend's side was safely in his apartment. But my side? Oh no. It was fluttering down towards the street, right towards the heads of Cop and Zaki, who were intently discussing the merits of the project.
I turned from the window - in a complete panic - and began RUNNING, tape reel in hand, as fast as I could through the apartment! Through the living room, through the corridor, past the kitchen and another corrdidor - with the tape trailing behind me. Finally, I reached my bedroom, and with no where left to run I started spinning in circles as fast as I could, wrapping the tape around me. When I finally fell onto by bed, dizzy, I could only hope that enough tape had been taken in through the window to avoid A Scene.
Luckily, it was. Like I said, that tape is strong.
So let this be a lesson to those of you still in college: use the back windows that face the alley, instead.
If only the vacuum tube manuf. would go under ...
I've still an old concurrent machine that uses these. I've been trying to kill it for years. One more nail in the coffin!
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
I used to have to lug 15 of these buggers to other buildings for 'offsite' storage. Now it looks like I have to get a new exercise routine.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Are there still companies making paper tape, punch cards, 5.25" diskettes, TK50 cartridges and other waning media?
I used to work at a place that had a tape robot. The machine would get a request for some data item; the robot would go pick it up, load it, and run it. Those things look really damn cool.
all the cross-dressing sysadmins who like to put on some makeup, turn on the 9-track and pull a wig down from the shelf? I can almost hear someone singing "suddenly I'm Ms. Ada Lovelace."
Or was that way too much of an inside joke?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
We have a problem. Need to forward this story to my boss, Mr. Nine-Track-Will-Be-Around-Forever guy.
Wow... This brings back the memories.
At my first real employer in technology, we were nice and up to date... 4mm DAT for all our backups.
Except... we interfaced with some companies in the healthcare industry. All of their data came in on 9-Track.
Everyone else had a great deal of difficulty making the tape drive read some of the various formats and work out the bpi and character formats on our flukey old 9-track drive... except me. I was the 9-Track Wizard. Give me the tape and I could get the data off. Reel bent in the mail? No problem. Cut tapes? Bring it on...
I even got the responsibility for blanking out the tapes. I had to write a nice little program to write prime numbers to the tapes in order to have some nice random data.
Ah, those were the days, years ago. All gone now.
I'll miss you, little 9-track.
*sniff*
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
.. the stone tablet has been retired. When asked God said "all new communication will be via post-it notes"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...several hundred used 9-tracks available for sale cheap. $1 each plus shipping :)
I came across an old stash of 5.25" disks from my first Apple //c (1984 or so). After seeing this article, I went and did a search to see if anyone was still making those, as well.
_ MA XELL.phtml
Imation and Maxell, at least, are still producing them.
http://www.intimecatalog.com/supplies/DISKETTES
Any guesses when those will stop being produced?
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
I have one .. but it's on the west coast of Canada right now(I'm on the east)
;)
Though depending on how critical that data is I'm sure something can be arranged
Local election boards throughout the
country will now have to upgrade
their systems. For decades, that's
the only way you could get voter's
lists.
Many companies still use 9 tracks (I work for the phone company) to transfer data around. We also do NDM and cartridges. Hopefully this will make them modernize their equipment.
What's the capacity of these things? Grabbing some numbers (length and bpi) from other posts my rough calculations show about 10.7 MB. Is this right?
...they have announced a new technology which can fit 720 kilobytes of data onto an item called a floppy disk
Get your Unix fortune now!
OKay this is the funniest story I've read all day! =) Moderators need to mod this up, im dying of laughter here =) thanksl for cheering my day up!
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
Back in the Navy, 73-76, we regularly dumped old tapes, and I found two ways more fun (and more time away from the chiefs!). One way: run off a hundred or two feet, hold on to the end, and spin the reel with the rest of the tape off the fantail -- mighty spin, so it unwound as it flew backwards. When it hit the water, it would unwind more, and you were left with a 1000 foot ribbon floating in the air from your hand. Let it go, and watch it slowly drift down.
Other way was slide it down a swab handle, spin off enough tape to reach the water, and sooner or later the water would get a good hold of it and start unwinding it. You held the swab handle with both hands, being damned sure to keep the spinning reel centered, because it would give you a good burn it was spinning so fast. Eventually all the tape was in the water, at which time you flipped the swab handle up and away so the empty reel spun off like a frisbee, much faster than any mere hand spin could do.
Yeh, probably not a reel (sic) environmentally friendly way to dump them, but it gave the Soviet trawlers something to watch.
Actually, in hi-rise dorms it's much more fun to tie and end off and get in the elevator.
Got one. We in fact still use it <gasp!>
We do a lot of work with state and federal governments and they still use them so we have to sometimes as well. In fact, we're working on a project right now with a state agency and the only common format they can provide us data on (that we can read) is 9-track. They have newer cartridges but we've already got the 9-track in use and don't see much point in buying a new drive to read the cartridges from their mainframes.
They've already told us that next year, however, we'll have to find a different way because they're finally retiring their 9-tracks.
I said, "Can't you just burn the data onto CD-Rs for us?"
in 1981, I was a tape ape for a company that developed credit union software before i became a tape ape at an automotive manufacturer on old Data General and DEC stuff.. remember:
- putting the little silver part on the tape a few feet down so that we could test multiple tape logic
- carrying a whole bunch of tapes on your arm so you looked like the michelin man
- playing ring toss with the write rings
- trying to get all the colors of the olympic logo in write rings!!
- speculating what sized building you could wrap a mag tape around (we never got around to seeing if it would make it around the Pontiac Silverdome)
- tex wipes: you could take anything off of anything with these things.. too bad they had CFC's in them.
- When my direct deposit arrived at the credit union, it had exactly one record on it because I was the only person who worked where i did who had an account at that credit union.
- manually threading.. what fun!!
-bob
Restrictions are prohibited. Be well, get better.
I know some businesses still use the darn 9-track things... electric utilities were still sending in emission data on 9-tracks to the agency I was working at through 1999. The one tape drive we had that could read them broke constantly. What a PITA.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Presumably Henry Spencer (or others at utzoo or elsewhere) could use something like this to bundle up tapes of somewhat more modern provenance...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Many years ago I worked as a programmer/analyst on a very large mainframe accounting system. One set of programs that I was maintaining did a monthly reconciliation from history and posted beginning balances. The code (COBOL of course - shudder) had originally been written in the 1970's and worked quite well, but was rather obfuscated.
Suddenly we started having a problem with one particular set of accounts, the amounts being posted were coming out wrong by a significant margin. But the problem made no sense because no other accounts were affected and I couldn't find a bug in the code that would do this. After several months of this (and my boss coming down on my neck) I decided to go down to the computer center and watch the process run in person.
I know. I know. Going to the watch a program run should make no difference at all. But I was getting desparate!
So I am sitting in a room half the size of a football field, full of hulking mainframe equipment, watching while the operators fetch and load the nine-track tapes containing the accounting history for that year. About fifteen minutes into the process one of the tape drives started 'hiccuping'. It would advance, backup, advance, backup over and over. Then one of the operators went up to it, stopped it, opened the glass cover, advanced the tape by hand, closed the cover and restarted it.
I nearly fell out of my shoes. I then asked what the hell he thought he was doing? "Oh, we have problems with that tape all the time, so we just turn it past the problem!"
Turns out the tape had a bad spot. If the operator had left it alone it would have timed out and we would have gotten a console error. Instead the operator would hand-turn it past the bad spot and the way the tape blocks were written to tape allowed it to actually continue from that point.
So I created a new tape from the backup; problem solved and my boss was happy with me. No the operator wasn't fired, but they did do some 're-training'. The accountants were still pissed anyway, but they always seemed to have a bug up their butts.
Me, I felt like a gawdamn Sherlock Holmes...
Jack William Bell, who did his time in the COBOL mines and is *never* going back...
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
This is unbelievable... just when the linux port was around the corner, look what happened ! :)
I can't even imagine a beowulf cluster of these babies anymore
Thought I'd share a useless, though maybe interesting, use of the plastic write-enable rings that used to come on 9-track tapes (little plastic rings about 4" in diameter).
It's a Christmas (er, I mean Unnamed Holiday) tradition in our family to "play rings". Basically, about 25 years ago, my Dad managed to get hold of a big box of plastic write-enable rings. So, we put a target (like a beer bottle, or a toilet plunger, or anything else that is skinny and stands up) in the middle of the room and throw rings at it. There are enough rings for everyone to have a good 50-60 of them.
Of course, what invariably happens is that someone ends up accidentally hitting someone else, sparking a huge ring fight with everyone trying to bean everyone else. The room always ends up covered in rings, and when anyone runs out of rings, they have to go gather up used ones from the floor, which always leads to them getting pelted with more of the things as other family members see an easy target.
It'll be sad to see these stop being produced, even if my only involvment with them had absolutely nothing to do with "the good old days of computing".
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
was to go to the various data-centers for oil companies, etc. around town and load up my truck with boxes of these tapes. Then I would drive back to the office, unload them and take a rag saturated with some Evil Orange Crap(tm) and wipe it all over the labels on the reels. This stuff would soak into the paper labels and soften the glue, but not before it has caused severe drying and burns on my hands.
Once the reels soaked long enough, I would take a razor and start scraping the labels, also subjecting my hands to more EOC(tm) and possible razor cuts. Then I would have to clean the EOC(tm) off the tapes, which incidentally, the EOC(tm) can remove almost anything, but you can't remove the EOC(tm). then I would put the tapes into a machine that would basically do the equivalent of a low-level format and check for bad tracks/sectors.
If a tape had fewer than x number of bad sectors, then it would be fit for resale. My boss would sell these tapes back to the same companies we bought them from for a few dollars less than they paid for them.
Of course, this all came to an end when (a) people started switching to other backup media and (b) hard drives started getting cheaper.
Needless to say, I was happy when we stopped refurbing the tapes. Hooray for their demise!!!!!
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
I'm sad to see that eMag is going to be ceasing production, but there are plenty of other sources out there for 9-track tape. Plenty of systems out there still use it (some of them in great quantity). One of the biggest consumers of 9-track is the hospital industry -- there's a good chance a portion, if not all, of your medical history is still shuttled around on 9-track. The place where I work now has a division that does nothing but take 9-track from state health insurance programs and hospitals and produce billing runs from them.
:)
That being said, if we're going to rid ourselves of 9-track for good, there's plenty of excellent fun to be had with it.
One of the best uses for it is to use it to prevent someone from getting into something. To wit: get a friend to help you wrap the contents of a couple of reels around someone's car. Just pass the reel back and forth underneath the car and gradually work it backwards from about where the side mirrors are located. About 3 1000' reels is enough to completely cover the doors. Do it TIGHTLY, almost to the point where the tape breaks. Once you've got a good seal (you'll know you do when you release the ends of the tape and it doesn't move at all), you're done. Damn near impossible to remove easily, and even though the door handles will be accessible, it will take the friggin' Jaws of Life to open the doors. That tape is stronger than it looks.
Another use for it is Christmas decoration. Pack away a couple of reels and use it like tinsel on your tree next year. Don't use it sparingly -- drape it on. It makes a lovely silvery-black tree.
A friend of mine and I used to take a few reels up to the top of a very large hill and "race the reels." You've got to have a really LONG runour on the hill for this. All you have to do for this one is drop the reel on the ground, stand it upright, and pull as hard as you can on the loose tape end. Once the reel starts rolling down the hill, keep pulling steadily but back off a bit in speed. You'll find that the reel will speed up quite a bit as it unspools. In fact, they can get _deadly_ fast! Doing this trick with metal reels once caused one of them to imbed itself about an inch in a cinderblock wall at the end of the hill.
Just my contribution to the end-of-life celebrations.
Yeah, this is not related, but I had to attach it to a highly-moderated comment so people would see it.
We just packed up and shipped off our last 9-track mainframe drive for scrap.
Don't scrap your old hardware. It pollutes the environment. Instead you can donate it (if it is still usable-not something like this tape) or have it recycled.
800/1600/6250 bpi 9-track
DC-300A tape cartridge
1.44 3.5" floppy
5.25" DS/DD floppy
HP format 2gb DAT
8mm Exabyte tape
100mb Zip
and now I'd probably add
600mb CDR
20gb/40gb DLT
This becomes important because we were forever being asked which media we supported for interchange (people would send us 100mb things). "Oh, we have the ability to read all of the stuff god sends us..."
-- Multics
P.S. Oh, yeah god has retired only three media formats so far: 80-column punched cards, 8" SS SD floppy disks and of course paper tape (via his/her recently retired ASR-33 TTY)
P.S.S. I'll be keeping my 9-track drive around until it dies. Never know when another 9-track tape needs to be dusted off and despooled. The final era of tape drives are painless, rackmountable, reliable, self-loading, and play well with others on a SCSI-2 bus.
The Jargon file for some amusing historical perspective. Specifically, Walking Drives, and the 3rd example hack (the Xerox CP-V system) in Appendix A.
ehintz
My favorite was our DEC TU16. It was frequently my job to run backups, using SAVER, and cleaning the vacuum chambers. It was kinda fun to wait while writing tapes with PIP or any of my various utilities and listen to the soft, gentle thup-thup, thip-thip as it loaded. Then the raspberry when it completely rewound tape and the trailing end flapped in the breeze in one of the vacuum chambers. Marvelous. DAT just isn't the same...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yeah, my introduction to Unix was 4.2 BSD running on a Celerity 1260. We had a 9-track drive hooked up to it so that we could not only archive files at the incredible density of 1600 bpi, but also to transfer files from machines that did not have good IP connections back in 1985.
When I moved locations, I brought my user directories with me, all 40 MB of them, on a reel of 9 track tape. Now, with disks as cheap as they are, I keep the compressed tar files as but a small portion of my multi-GB user directory and have scrapped the reel of tape.
At the time, I felt the 9 track tapes were more reliable and portable than the new fangled 1/4-inch QIC drives that, for example, I had on a Sun 3/160.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I want to mark all the idiots who modded this up as my enemies.
9-track tapes are designed for long-term storage. You put your data on one of those, and if you follow the proper procedures for storing it and retensioning the tape every few years and so on, you can be pretty sure that the data will still be readable 30 years later. Even more important than long storage lifetime with appropriate maintenance is that the storage lifetime and required maintenance to achieve long lifetime are know and well-defined. That's a critical feature in some applications - important enough to make it worth dealing with the other less pleasant aspects of 9-track technology.
On one of my co-op terms I copied a bunch of remote sensing data from 9-track to 8mm cartridges. I sure hope they kept the 9-track originals, because those will still be readable today. The 8mm tapes aren't - the stored data degrades after 5 to 10 years under the (admittedly non-optimal) conditions where we were using the tapes. CD-R is supposed to last for decades, but we don't know that it really does yet; there may be problems yet to be discovered with dyes fading, drives spinning discs too fast so that they break (52x CD-ROM drives have been observed to do that), or drives becoming unavailable because they've all been replaced with "secure" audio media For The Artists' Protection.
That scientific data will still be valuable to researchers for at least a hundred years. My ex-employers can re-copy it if necessary, but they don't have the budget to do that very often, and they want to be very sure that they know exactly how often it has to be re-copied to maintain a specified level of reliability. Properly used 9-track archive tapes are acceptable in that application. I don't know of any other medium that is. So within a very limited field, 9-track appears to me to be state of the art today.
I hope there's some acceptable replacement available today, or that there will be before the stocks of blank tapes run out.
We still use IBM compatible 9 track tapes on the S390 where I work (and there is even an IBM 3525 card punch and reader. Standard open reels came in 2400 foot lengths (not 1,000...although longer ones eventually came out). They came in 3 densities, 800, 1600, and 6250 bpi. The earliest I remember seeing them was on an IBM 3410 tape drive,circa 1976, although we keep around a few old 3420s for vendor tapes. As far as sprinkling magnetic powder on a tape to get blocksize for a DD statement: that's crap. It'd ruin the tape or the drive. That's what IBM utilities are for (such as DITTO..way cool util).
Everytime an old technology dies out or is retired, we have this pissing game on /. to see who is the geekiest, the most senior, the oldest, the longest beard, etc.
Poor people who grew up with the boring DOS have no interesting story, I guess. There's a gap of one generation of people who grew up with the mainframe, and those who grew up with Linux. Now, those who grew up with DOS, what are you gonna do?
a lot of financials still use 9-track to report to credit bureaus and the IRS.
What's really funny is that the IRS is the progressive one when it comes time that you want to enter the 80's and transmit over a BBS. Credit bureaus are a PITA. ask me how I know.
In 1996 when I started collecting mp3 files I very quickly hit the 50Mb quota at our Unis computer society. I didn't want to erase files and since the CD-writer was booked for the next week I had to backup my mp3's to tape.. :) .. Thus I learned the true purpose of the tar command.. I later continued using the tapes for backup and storage since hardly anyone used them. I had to go from the terminal room to where the tape device was: in the serverroom which was deep down in the basement of the Uni.. :) .. Those were _those_ days..
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
Redundant? Excuse me, but I posted this very early on in the discussion, and noone before me had asked these questions. From the replies it seems I've gotten some interesting answers to those questions (which I appreciate) which must mean that my post wasn't so redundant that people didn't find it interesting. So kiss my ass you piece of shit moderators!!!
~ now you know
I took one and tied an end to a lamppost and put the reel on my side view mirror and drove down the street.
I wanted to see if it really was 2400 feet but all I ended up doing was scratch the paint on my truck where the reel was spinning.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with. - Tennessee Williams
God, I'm laughing so hard it hurts behind my ears.
What muscle attaches there? Shit, i'm glad I work in an office of clueless idiots, noone even noticed the tears trailing down my face from laughing that hard.
Oh, the memories...
Are they being made anymore?
We still use them at our company on an almost daily basis. Not because _WE_ need to, but because other companies still have tons of data on 9 track tapes that need to be transferred to other medium, primarily CDs these days. Most of these companies didn't realize that when they got rid of their drives that the tapes would be useless to them. That's where we come in. But while magnetic media is prone to failure (just like floppies and cassettes), if tape drives are cleaned regularly and good care is kept with the tapes, they can last a LONG time. Just because production is going to stop, doesn't really mean anything. 9 track tapes are pretty much a dime a dozen these days - probably cheaper. If you need them, doesn't matter if they're used... As long as the casing isn't cracked, chances are you won't have a problem if you still have "older technology."
We did that, and more. I modified the core loader tape to erase the boot loader, so the victim would have to toggle it in again.
One particularly obtuse recipient of this gift repeated the cycle seven times.
He wasn't very fond of my presence after that.
Oh yeah? Ever watch a luser toggle in the boot loader 4 times with the panel lock enabled?
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
If you have a lot of random hardware to deal with, and aren't dealing with massive amounts of data, than popping in a floppy and copying the files to it is a lot more likely to work in a few minutes.
And they couldn't burn the data onto CD-R's? What retards. Oh yeah, it's the government we're talking about here. Some 60 year old senator who knows nothing about computer technology probably passed a law that said they had to use 9-track tapes.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
As for finding tapes, I'm sure that some will continue to come up in bargain bins if you search hard enough...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
More likely somebody got a tax cut by slashing the technology budget for the agency. I work for a small non-profit and we upgrade our hardware and software more often than some of the government agencies we work with.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
We aren't talking about peecees, monkey boy.
Oh man, does that bring back memories (pardon the pun)!
In 1986, I was working for a small IBM shop that had a couple of those tilted 9-track jobbies (I forget the model, but it looked kinda like a psychotic drafting table), along with other assorted equipment of varying vintage. I came in one morning to find the whole place in a complete uproar over the fact that the previous night's accounting run was completely fsck'ed (ditto-ed?), with none of the totals syncing up. Since the on-line system needed that data to be correct, no one aside from the DP department was able to do anything. After 4 hours, we finally determined that the night operator (we had no tape-apes) had somehow inverted the tape while loading it, and the batch system simply disregarded the input for lack of a tape mark. 12 hours after that, every thing was finally synced and ready to go. The VP of DP ordered 2 brand spanking new 3480 drives the next day.
The organization in question uses a LOAD of PEECEEs as you put it (and some Macs thrown in for good measure) and they are familiar with CD-Rs (at least in some departments) but they are no more capable of taking data out of DB/2 on an ES9000 and getting it into a flat ASCII CSV file on CD-R than we are...seeing as we have no ES9000.
I would think that since they have the mainframe(s) and they have tools like Essbase and SAS and they have the middle-ware gateways to connect them, they could extract the data they need from one of their query tools and burn it onto CD-R. But they don't know how...and they already know how to dump it to 9-track.
We've still got 9 tracks pumping away week after week, on a good ole' 6250 that makes the place look like a modern art sculpture depicting old vs. new =)
... and the lovely EBCDIC conversions .. and re-coding our import applications every time their format specification changes. I'm guessing we'll start getting CD's soon ....
Interesting thing to me is that our source tapes (and the ONLY reason we use that behemoth drive) are coming from the State of Texas - DPS (Department of Protective Services, the bureau that handles motor vehicle licenses). I've always wondered why they still used these tapes (other than beurocracy) -- now I see that the supposed last supplier of media is based in Texas. Hmmmm..... more government suck-ups for business??
Anyway, I'll miss the *thwap* sound of loading those tapes
Groove Salad -- a nicely chilled plate of ambient grooves and beats.
It's sad to see 9-track die, but there are still plenty of companies that seem to be doing well with the stuff. With all the legacy systems out there, I suspect we're still stuck with this old tech for a bit.
2 tapes from the mid 80's written on a 2060. I've wanted to get a copy of whats on them off to CDR but have been put off by the large $$ people try to charge to do this. And now the machines will be disappearing.. oh well.
Back in 1982, I was going to toss a bad Scotch Black Watch tape reel, but instead, as a joke, I unreeled and stuffed it into a box, sealed it up, and sent it through company mail to a co-worker...in a classified gov't facility.
He laughed, until he realized he had to destroy the tape (no unclass mag storage could leave the building, even in the trash). Being loose tape, he couldn't degauss it on a machine, and continuous tape would jam the shredder, so the Security People made him chop it into 6" pieces. All 2400 feet of tape. Boy, was he ever *pissed off* at me (while grudgingly admitting it was a good joke).The problem is, as you noted, that it is easy, and procedures exist, to dump data to tape. Extracting the data, moving it to another system, and reformatting it for PC file formats, is not so simple.
Time to find a use for all of those magnetic tape erasers.
A place I worked had a so-called "disintegrator" into which we'd pile books, manuals, 11x14-7/8" greenbar paper, etc. for destruction. A favorite was a full tape reel, because it made a horrific grinding/clattering noise. We once opened up the equipment to see what the ground-up results looked like: white powder for the paper, and a pile of cocoa for the tape!
No, I didn't taste it.If we ever get to the point where we need a new source for Soylent Green, we can just post that some obscure technology is dying, and kidnap everyone who pops out of the woodwork to reminisce about it!
At least, that's how we used to do it. Ah, those were the days... hang on, someone's at the dooaaRRGH NO DON'T TURN ME INTO FOOD AGUUYTQOVU5q6ew765127 kqe =-;el2qr3k
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Same rule still applies, when her boyfriend comes home. "Use the back windows that face the alley"
God spoke to me
Those old tapes were made with mylar, which resists stretching (an important characteristic in a tape, as you can imagine).
I wonder what television and movies are going to substitute for all those old shots where rack after rack of 9-track tape reels is shown, to illustrate the vast quantities of data on [whatever] are being stored.
OK, and why did you feel the need for this "tape wire"?
www.eFax.com are spammers
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Richard Brautigan, 1935-1984
1966 - 1967 - Poet-in-residence at the California Institute of Technology.
Some people mentioned how easily these tapes deteriorated, and that optical media is a superior replacement. I'm not so sure about that though; I have three Sony CD-R's that the coating has begun chipping off of. Does anyone know what causes this? Out of all my CD's the only brand I ever experienced this with was Sony.
We used to use a Unisys A-11 with 3480 cartridge tapes for the most part but we also had a single 9" drive for old tapes. Just before they took the machine away in 1999 I found a tape from 1982 with the source code for a Pascal compiler. Although the tape was 17-18 years old it copied without any errors. We had some tapes which were in the 20-22 year old range and they still worked well. I would also liked to have retrieved one of the drive motors from the older, vertical drives. These motors were very HIGH torque motors - ever notice how fast they could spin up a full reel? And reversible to boot! (Although, I do not know if they were 120v or 240v???)
Each drive had two reels and two columns to maintain slack when the the tape reels reversed or stopped. When a column loaded you got a loud, satisfying PHONKKK as the vacuum pulled the loop of tape to the bottom of the column.
Each drive had two manual feed buttons to spin the tape in one direction, or the other.
And no interlock.
So all you had to do was load a tape (it was traditional to find a fellow graduate student with thesis data on tape, and do a quick swap with a scratch tape).
Load the tape.
Then press both buttons at once, listen to the PHONKS, watch the reels spin madly, stretching the tape to a tiny thread until it broke, provoking another round of PHONKS.
and listen for the scream.
I believe CDC added an interlock
Pure scientific research doesn't need a reason at the moment, as the best reasons will be realized upon accomplishing the experiments.
Rod Taylor
If there was a drive left anywhere that could read it, it would probably read OK, 35 years after it was written.
Qualstar (the company I work for) still makes 9-track drives. Now you can relax (at least for a few more months until we stop as well). Apparently, the last manufacturer of 9-track tape heads is out of business and so no one can buy the heads anymore. We were going to stop anyway due to declining business, but no heads made it sooner. There are many companies that transcribe tapes from 9-track for a living, so your collection can still be retrieved for a price!
First IT job, making COM microfiche from 7 & 9 track tape. Such memories - customers sending in print jobs (printer spool file > tape) that ran over a hundred or more tapes!
Soroban also made wide paper tape readers and punches, possibly as many as 40 channels. They were in Melbourne, Fla., iirc.
nbodley [at} world [dot} std [dot} com
SEMA tech. for a spell...
The apartment building had large, J-shaped units with several bedrooms. (Actually, half the units were J and half were reverse J -- hence the U-shaped building, since they met at the middle.) My bedroom and my friend's were both symmetrically at the midpoint of the U, so we were separated by 6 inches of plasterboard as the crow flies. But, since the building was divided in half, giving him a copy of this week's Circuits homework required walking out to the front of the apartment (at the tip of the U), down 3 flights of stairs (no elevator in the building), going across the courtyard, getting buzzed in through security, up 3 flights of stairs -- then going all the way back.
The asymmetry of this situation was what was so comical. So, our plan was to attach a tape that was twice the length of the span between the windows, so that we could attach a bag to it and be able to pass objects back and forth. We did finally do it, too, around the back of the U instead of spanning the tips.
I live in Graham, Texas, where the eMag factory that closed down is at. It's a small town (just under 10 thousand). There isn't much in the way of industry here, but for my entire life, eMag has always been here under one name or another. It's always been that factory with the big white steaming pipes right next to the Walmart and across from the airport. Some people worked there long enough to retire. It was quite a shock to the entire town a few weeks ago when the local paper said "eMag to shut down factory". The factory had downsized a few times in the past, but it has never officially shut down. It always seemed like one of those things that would be there forever, but it wasn't. Part of this town is gone now.
If you've got a budget for the data conversion, follow the link in the article to E-mag. They do conversion too. In fact, it looks like they're counting on getting _more_ conversion business from this!
Sigh. I've never even HEARD of eMag. I doubt that they are the last maker of 9-track tapes. IMATION seems to still sell them.
So the enemy takes off the tape that was caught on their submarine when they get back to base, they wind it back up again, pour some Coca-Cola on it to get rid of any rust, and see what kind of data recovery they can manage. Hey, it could happen! I saw something similar in an old GI Joe cartoon where they took a broken floppy disk & salvaged something important from it! TV wouldn't lie to me, would it?
:)
You're the irritating lamer. I did not assume you could "slap a cd-rw drive" into their random big iron mainframe. However, I still contend that they should be able to extract the data from the machine somehow, either via a network connection or capturing the data from a serial console.
If you could compile rzsz for this mainframe, you could use a serial console to send the files over to a PEECEE, as you call them.
It's easier than you think, ignorant one.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Well, for example, I had my
LOKI DESCENT3 DISC#1
literally shrapnel-ize itself in my 52x drive, taking the drive out with it. Makes a hell of a bang too, especially when you're sitting there in the dark at 11pm. This was a 'manufactured' not burned disc.
"Prepare for Descent......." **BLAM***tinkletinkle
Crawl out from under desk. "WTF?"
Blech. Signatures.
My question about the Tape Archive is ... who will be daring enough to open Pandora's box of data?
(For those who didn't read the link, Pandora Berman and Brian K. Zuzga were archiving data from tapes.)
How are you going to run rzsz over a 3270 synchronous serial interface? Have you ever actually used an IBM mainframe?
I'm reminded of Warren Beatty's story about the sound track in Bonnie and Clyde. One of Beatty's favorite movies was Shane, and he copied various technical tricks from that movie, including the startling sound effect used for gunshots. At the premier, Beatty was dismayed to find that this sound effect wasn't coming through. He rushed up to the booth, and found the projectionist standing with one hand on the volume knob, so he could turn down the sound every time a gun went off. The projectionist turned to him and said, "You got a real problem with this sound track. I haven't seen one so screwed up since Shane!"