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

Tue Sep 20 04:32:41 UTC 2011

given that as 729 maxes out at 800cpi there are probably slightly kinky
ways to attack the problem, e.g. someone doing it with disk packs.

http://chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/

there's still plenty of equipment that can wrap 1/2" tape around a spindle.

On 9/19/11 21:14 , Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> 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.. ;)
> 