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 ...'"

Damn!

[Rayonic]

Just after I bought a 9-track player for my car!

Man.. What am I going to do with all those tapes?

[maxoutrocketmail.com]

Oops.. 9 track. I thought it was 8 track! I was worried about what I was going to do with my great 70's classic rock. The 8 track still works great in my Pinto with a speaker in front and a speaker in back. Don't scare us like that next time!

Still using them!

[pantaz]

We've got customers still sending us data on 9-track. Guess they'll be stocking up!

Perfect timing

[Pope]

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*

Re:takes me back

[renehollan]

But then again, I have more memory on my machine than my first computer had in hard drive space. (by a long shot)

Heh. I have more L1 cache than my first machine had external storage.

Time to upgrade.

[SirStanley]

I guess now I can finally convince my boss to let me upgrade our IT Department

Re:takes me back

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Your first machine had external storage? We had to have the machine electrically shock people to write things down on paper to store them. And we were glad to have it too... you kids with your new-fangled...

I remember...

[dozing]

Back when I was about 12 my dad brought one of the tapes home from work and I unwound it all through the house for hours. Mom wasn't too thrilled and made me clean it up. But it sure was fun...

Re:takes me back

[renehollan]

You had electricity?!

Re:What a good way to play geekier than though

[gregor-e]

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...)

One-liners Rendered Obsolete

[bughunter]

Tape Librarians Will Mount Anything

Just great....

[Kenja]

Now where will I get a replacment copy of KC and the SunShine Band..... Oh wait, 9 track? Never mind then.

Noooo! Bring back the 9-track tapes!

[jelson]

Please, say it isn't so! Say that 9-track tapes will still be available from somewhere! They are so useful for getting in trouble with the police!

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 [amazon.com] - 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.

What will the IRS and FAA do ??

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

If only the vacuum tube manuf. would go under ...

Uh-oh....

[r_j_prahad]

We have a problem. Need to forward this story to my boss, Mr. Nine-Track-Will-Be-Around-Forever guy.

Random thoughts from a former tape-ape

[Ommadawn]

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

Re:What a good way to play geekier than though

[killmenow]

Is that you, Mel? [astrian.net]

Something fun to do with 9-track tape

[irregular_hero]

I'm sad to see that eMag is going to be ceasing production, but there are plenty of other sources out there for 9-track tape. Plenty of systems out there still use it (some of them in great quantity). One of the biggest consumers of 9-track is the hospital industry -- there's a good chance a portion, if not all, of your medical history is still shuttled around on 9-track. The place where I work now has a division that does nothing but take 9-track from state health insurance programs and hospitals and produce billing runs from them.

That being said, if we're going to rid ourselves of 9-track for good, there's plenty of excellent fun to be had with it.

One of the best uses for it is to use it to prevent someone from getting into something. To wit: get a friend to help you wrap the contents of a couple of reels around someone's car. Just pass the reel back and forth underneath the car and gradually work it backwards from about where the side mirrors are located. About 3 1000' reels is enough to completely cover the doors. Do it TIGHTLY, almost to the point where the tape breaks. Once you've got a good seal (you'll know you do when you release the ends of the tape and it doesn't move at all), you're done. Damn near impossible to remove easily, and even though the door handles will be accessible, it will take the friggin' Jaws of Life to open the doors. That tape is stronger than it looks.

Another use for it is Christmas decoration. Pack away a couple of reels and use it like tinsel on your tree next year. Don't use it sparingly -- drape it on. It makes a lovely silvery-black tree.

A friend of mine and I used to take a few reels up to the top of a very large hill and "race the reels." You've got to have a really LONG runour on the hill for this. All you have to do for this one is drop the reel on the ground, stand it upright, and pull as hard as you can on the loose tape end. Once the reel starts rolling down the hill, keep pulling steadily but back off a bit in speed. You'll find that the reel will speed up quite a bit as it unspools. In fact, they can get _deadly_ fast! Doing this trick with metal reels once caused one of them to imbed itself about an inch in a cinderblock wall at the end of the hill.

Just my contribution to the end-of-life celebrations. :)

God still owns a 9-track drive

[Multics]

Sometimes there is a discussion around where I work about what are good interchange formats. We decided that 'god' owns drives for the following formats (this was a few years ago):

800/1600/6250 bpi 9-track

DC-300A tape cartridge

1.44 3.5" floppy

5.25" DS/DD floppy

HP format 2gb DAT

8mm Exabyte tape

100mb Zip

and now I'd probably add

600mb CDR

20gb/40gb DLT

This becomes important because we were forever being asked which media we supported for interchange (people would send us 100mb things). "Oh, we have the ability to read all of the stuff god sends us..."

-- Multics

P.S. Oh, yeah god has retired only three media formats so far: 80-column punched cards, 8" SS SD floppy disks and of course paper tape (via his/her recently retired ASR-33 TTY)

P.S.S. I'll be keeping my 9-track drive around until it dies. Never know when another 9-track tape needs to be dusted off and despooled. The final era of tape drives are painless, rackmountable, reliable, self-loading, and play well with others on a SCSI-2 bus.

Re:takes me back

[superdoo]

My first computer was a bucket full of rocks. You should have seen how excited I was when we got the expansion bucket!

Re:Perfect timing

[Pope]

Tron wasn't a fantasy then was it?

Hell, yeah. Screw the Segway, I want a goddamn Lightcycle! [mac.com] (200k)
You listening, Bezos?!

Re:takes me back

[gosand]

Phbbt. You probably had a metal bucket. I had to carve my rock bucket out of rock, using a small pointed stick.

Re:"The geekiest pissing game"

[Simple Simian]

No there's some goodies you can tall-tale about.

"The real DOS programmers use 'COPY CON FILENAME.EXE" for example.

Or one that happened to me - talking a (l)user over the phone through using edlin to configure kermit as a terminal program for a user on Win 3.1 over a DOS version too old to have EDIT.EXE (what was that, DOS 3.3?)

Naturally, for sake of Murphy as well as bonus points, I hadn't touched edlin for some 3 years before that call.

I don't know whether to scream or pat my back on that one.

Re:Random thoughts from a former tape-ape

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't those tapes something like 2600 feet long? You must be a beast now.

Soylent Green

[Dirtside]

If we ever get to the point where we need a new source for Soylent Green, we can just post that some obscure technology is dying, and kidnap everyone who pops out of the woodwork to reminisce about it!

At least, that's how we used to do it. Ah, those were the days... hang on, someone's at the dooaaRRGH NO DON'T TURN ME INTO FOOD AGUUYTQOVU5q6ew765127 kqe =-;el2qr3k

Re:Fun to unload off the fantail of the carrier

[markmoss]

Certainly not environmentally friendly. I've got this mental picture of a whole pod of killer whales strung together on one tape, passed through each from mouth to rear. 8-)