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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 ...'"
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!
Mag Tape? You young whippersnappers had it easy! You ever have to toggle in a bootstrap loader, then read a core loader from paper tape? Them were the days, I tell ya. Men were men, and bits were things ya could hold in yer hand! (I think I still have a bag of bits somewhere in my basement...)
Tape Librarians Will Mount Anything
I can see the fnords!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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