9-Track Open Reel Tape Production Ends This Year 245
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 ...'"
2001 Metaphor (Score:3, Interesting)
Are they really gone? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hm, this story again.
Aren't these guys [imation.com] still making their own tapes?
Memories! Misty.... (Score:3, Interesting)
At my first real employer in technology, we were nice and up to date... 4mm DAT for all our backups.
Except... we interfaced with some companies in the healthcare industry. All of their data came in on 9-Track.
Everyone else had a great deal of difficulty making the tape drive read some of the various formats and work out the bpi and character formats on our flukey old 9-track drive... except me. I was the 9-Track Wizard. Give me the tape and I could get the data off. Reel bent in the mail? No problem. Cut tapes? Bring it on...
I even got the responsibility for blanking out the tapes. I had to write a nice little program to write prime numbers to the tapes in order to have some nice random data.
Ah, those were the days, years ago. All gone now.
I'll miss you, little 9-track.
*sniff*
5.25" Disks (Score:3, Interesting)
Imation and Maxell, at least, are still producing them.
http://www.intimecatalog.com/supplies/DISKETTES
Any guesses when those will stop being produced?
Election boards througout the US must upgrade. (Score:1, Interesting)
country will now have to upgrade
their systems. For decades, that's
the only way you could get voter's
lists.
Fun to unload off the fantail of the carrier (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Converting old 9-track tapes to something bette (Score:2, Interesting)
We do a lot of work with state and federal governments and they still use them so we have to sometimes as well. In fact, we're working on a project right now with a state agency and the only common format they can provide us data on (that we can read) is 9-track. They have newer cartridges but we've already got the 9-track in use and don't see much point in buying a new drive to read the cartridges from their mainframes.
They've already told us that next year, however, we'll have to find a different way because they're finally retiring their 9-tracks.
I said, "Can't you just burn the data onto CD-Rs for us?"
TCFS (Score:3, Interesting)
Presumably Henry Spencer (or others at utzoo or elsewhere) could use something like this to bundle up tapes of somewhat more modern provenance...
Nine-Track Story (also 'Stupid Operator Story') (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
9-track write-enable tabs (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a Christmas (er, I mean Unnamed Holiday) tradition in our family to "play rings". Basically, about 25 years ago, my Dad managed to get hold of a big box of plastic write-enable rings. So, we put a target (like a beer bottle, or a toilet plunger, or anything else that is skinny and stands up) in the middle of the room and throw rings at it. There are enough rings for everyone to have a good 50-60 of them.
Of course, what invariably happens is that someone ends up accidentally hitting someone else, sparking a huge ring fight with everyone trying to bean everyone else. The room always ends up covered in rings, and when anyone runs out of rings, they have to go gather up used ones from the floor, which always leads to them getting pelted with more of the things as other family members see an easy target.
It'll be sad to see these stop being produced, even if my only involvment with them had absolutely nothing to do with "the good old days of computing".
My very first job in the IT field... (Score:5, Interesting)
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!!!!!
See also (Score:3, Interesting)
Yepp... sweet memories... *sigh* (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"The geekiest pissing game" (Score:2, Interesting)
yes yes I know some of you THINK it can't be done but that's what the EMS standard was originally for.
Why they ever emulated the XT memory upgrade interface on the 386 is beond me.
Re:What a good way to play geekier than though (Score:3, Interesting)
My format was a lot nicer, using all 8 bits (shorting load time) and breaking things up into blocks of 256 words, each with a checksum. If you got a checksum error you only had to back up one block rather than reload the whole damned program.
Getting this to work was one of the things that made me realize that writing software was what I wanted to do for a living.
I was in High School and the machine was a PDP-8/S (serial, 36 usecs to add two numbers) that travelled around between several schools, staying several weeks in one place and used to teach programming.
Most of the PDP-8 world used either reliable high-speed (300 CPS) optical paper tape readers, DECtape, or disks. 32 KW head-per-track drives, oh boy! or the RF08 that was 256 KW? something gigantic like that. We had one at the local science museum that died one day when a water-filled exhibit on the floor above dropped its load and gave the drive a shower.
More fun with 9 Track tape (CDC drives) (Score:2, Interesting)
Each drive had two reels and two columns to maintain slack when the the tape reels reversed or stopped. When a column loaded you got a loud, satisfying PHONKKK as the vacuum pulled the loop of tape to the bottom of the column.
Each drive had two manual feed buttons to spin the tape in one direction, or the other.
And no interlock.
So all you had to do was load a tape (it was traditional to find a fellow graduate student with thesis data on tape, and do a quick swap with a scratch tape).
Load the tape.
Then press both buttons at once, listen to the PHONKS, watch the reels spin madly, stretching the tape to a tiny thread until it broke, provoking another round of PHONKS.
and listen for the scream.
I believe CDC added an interlock
UNIVAC tape (Score:3, Interesting)
If there was a drive left anywhere that could read it, it would probably read OK, 35 years after it was written.
Not so fast (Score:2, Interesting)