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!
They make such systems using racks and racks of video digitizers that save to hard disk that is groomed to tape on large tape library systems. My my company Qualstar makes the libraries. Casinos typically need to keep 7 days of video from ALL cameras to satisfy legal requirements (gaming commissions). Most often this is still being done with VCR but lately the move to digital is on.
I believe they typically digitize at 15fps and often the video is multiplexed four inputs to a frame. I've been in several of the casino installations. They use enough CAT5 to rival a co-location facility (the camera feeds are CAT5 also).
Perhaps this might ruin it for you but the OS is NT. They use dual CPU (that is two motherboards) rack-mount boxes for the digitizers. Single CPUs for the tape controllers (interfaced SCSI to Sony AIT-2 drives). And a bunch of camera switch and control stuff all over.
The cool thing is their software that lets them see a bad guy and then queue up the back history following him/her camera to camera (with branching to follow accomplices). They call this sort of thing "investigations" and they used to take hours and hours. Now they can do it in 10s of minutes and dupe off a VCR tape for the police/whatever.
Most Target stores across the U.S. use the same system on a smaller scale.
Sorry, but Thermite is made from Aluminum and Iron Oxide (see http://www.encyclopedia.com/articlesnew/46287.html ). I've made it myself (get Aluminum powder from a paint supply outfit and Iron Oxide from --- ta, da! - rust) mix 2 to 3 ratio and make it very hot. In the lab it will burn through almost anything (crucibles, concrete, metals) so have a large quantity of sand arranged as a deep thick bowl under the mix before lighting. Stand way, way back or you'll get burned just from the IR radiation. Also it tends to sputter and launch little bits. The mix will burn anywhere and cannot be extinguished with any reasonable material or conditions, so you have to let it burn out (use a small amount).
Great fun!
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Now I'll have to buy that damned white album again!
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!
They make such systems using racks and racks of video digitizers that save to hard disk that is groomed to tape on large tape library systems. My my company Qualstar makes the libraries. Casinos typically need to keep 7 days of video from ALL cameras to satisfy legal requirements (gaming commissions). Most often this is still being done with VCR but lately the move to digital is on.
I believe they typically digitize at 15fps and often the video is multiplexed four inputs to a frame. I've been in several of the casino installations. They use enough CAT5 to rival a co-location facility (the camera feeds are CAT5 also).
Perhaps this might ruin it for you but the OS is NT. They use dual CPU (that is two motherboards) rack-mount boxes for the digitizers. Single CPUs for the tape controllers (interfaced SCSI to Sony AIT-2 drives). And a bunch of camera switch and control stuff all over.
The cool thing is their software that lets them see a bad guy and then queue up the back history following him/her camera to camera (with branching to follow accomplices). They call this sort of thing "investigations" and they used to take hours and hours. Now they can do it in 10s of minutes and dupe off a VCR tape for the police/whatever.
Most Target stores across the U.S. use the same system on a smaller scale.
Sorry, but Thermite is made from Aluminum and Iron Oxide (see http://www.encyclopedia.com/articlesnew/46287.html ). I've made it myself (get Aluminum powder from a paint supply outfit and Iron Oxide from --- ta, da! - rust) mix 2 to 3 ratio and make it very hot. In the lab it will burn through almost anything (crucibles, concrete, metals) so have a large quantity of sand arranged as a deep thick bowl under the mix before lighting. Stand way, way back or you'll get burned just from the IR radiation. Also it tends to sputter and launch little bits. The mix will burn anywhere and cannot be extinguished with any reasonable material or conditions, so you have to let it burn out (use a small amount).
Great fun!