wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper seeking advice on building a nationwide network

Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu
Tue Sep 20 04:14:59 UTC 2011


On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 05:32:04 +0200, Randy Bush said:

> you left out one connection via a chevy full of hollerith cards and the
> second a canoe full of 7 track tape in waterproof containers.

Does anybody actually *have* a functional 7 track drive?  I remember seeing a
story on PBS (may have been a Nova episode) where they discussed the fact that
NASA had literally thousands of 7 track tapes of telemetry data and no way to
read them because their last 7 track drive had died, and IBM had no 7 track
read/write heads left either...

(I admit we still have a rack of 9-track tapes in ez-loader seals in our tape
library, though we got rid of our last IBM 3420 about a decade ago. I think
most of them are tapes we've lost track of ownership info, and don't dare
dispose of in case the owner turns up.. ;)

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