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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 ...'"
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.
Hm, this story again.
Aren't these guys still making their own tapes?
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.
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
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.
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.
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?"
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?
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
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
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
Why bragging about getting a 2 meg memory upgrade for the XT of course...
yes yes I know some of you THINK it can't be done but that's what the EMS standard was originally for.
Why they ever emulated the XT memory upgrade interface on the 386 is beond me.
Heh, you laugh. The first useful program I wrote in my life was a bootstrap loader for the PDP-8. You toggled in a few instructions that loaded the loader, then the program from paper tape. DEC's format split 12 bit words into two 6 chunks leaving two bits on the tape unused (one bit was used as a "change address" flag). They'd distribute programs in one long stream with a checksum at the end. TTY 33 tape readers are slow (10 CPS) and unreliable, so after spending 10 minutes loading a program frequently you'd get a checksum error.
My format was a lot nicer, using all 8 bits (shorting load time) and breaking things up into blocks of 256 words, each with a checksum. If you got a checksum error you only had to back up one block rather than reload the whole damned program.
Getting this to work was one of the things that made me realize that writing software was what I wanted to do for a living.
I was in High School and the machine was a PDP-8/S (serial, 36 usecs to add two numbers) that travelled around between several schools, staying several weeks in one place and used to teach programming.
Most of the PDP-8 world used either reliable high-speed (300 CPS) optical paper tape readers, DECtape, or disks. 32 KW head-per-track drives, oh boy! or the RF08 that was 256 KW? something gigantic like that. We had one at the local science museum that died one day when a water-filled exhibit on the floor above dropped its load and gave the drive a shower.
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
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!