[rescue] Big tape drives

[Dave McGuire]

On Monday, October 14, 2002, at 04:18 PM, Eric Dittman wrote:
>>>>    Those TE16s will go with us to the grave, Josh...they're 
>>>> incredibly
>>>> difficult to find nowadays.
>>>>
>>>>    BUT...I'm not sure what kind of drives are on Claude's web page,
>>>> but
>>>> I assumed he wasn't talking about anything like a TE16...which is
>>>> indeed an upright 9-track magtape drive, but really is just a set of
>>>> rackmount components that can be put in any rack or set up on a 
>>>> table.
>>>> I assumed from what Eric said that the drive he saw was a big floor
>>>> standing box that IS a tape drive, not a big rack that contains a 
>>>> tape
>>>> drive.
>>>
>>> We've got a couple of TA91s at work, which are upright floor-
>>> standing tape drives, about five feet high, all of which are
>>> the tape drives themselves.
>>
>>    Well there *are* some relatively modern exceptions.  I think we're
>> really discussing the very old magtape drives whose vacuum columns go
>> all the way to the floor. :-)
>
> It's a good thing you said relatively.

   Well, we're talking about 40-year-old drives here.

   When did the TA91 come out, anyway?  I'm pretty sure they weren't 
around when I left my last VMS sysadmin job about 11 years ago.

     -Dave

--
Dave McGuire          "PC users only know two 'solutions'...
St. Petersburg, FL       reboot and upgrade."    -Jonathan Patschke