You guys are going to laugh, but I really, really want one of those tape machines behind them in my lab. Building a mock unit is on my bucket list. I've been collecting photographs and parts.
You guys are going to laugh, but I really, really want one of those tape machines behind them in my lab. Building a mock unit is on my bucket list. I've been collecting photographs and parts.
Have you specced out the motors?
A long time ago I took apart a DEC RP04 mainframe disk drive ( http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/rp04.html ). It got donated to the local Goodwill, which slapped a $250 price tag on it which stayed there for a year. Finally they got tired of looking at it and slapped a SALE $15 price tag on top of that, and I whipped out my wallet. (Cost $35 to rent the trailer I needed to get the thing home). The cake-sized disk platters were powered by a two horsepower three-phase motor. The power plate demanded 30 amps at 240 VAC. The heads were driven in and out by a 3 inch diameter voice coil working against a 50 pound cylindrical magnet. There was a card cage with about 20 square feet of mostly TTL and DTL circuit boards (not counting the read head amplifiers, which were in a special low noise box.) Tracks were located by a linear optical encoder with an etched glass code plate. The main power suply transformer weighed 70 pounds. It was awe inspiring to see how much hardware was poured into the task of storing 80 megabytes of data and getting it back in 50 milliseconds. Took me two days to completely disassemble and while I still have a lot of the parts they're mostly souvenirs.
The thing is, big iron was big IRON. Heavy stuff moved past powered by incredibly powerful motors and amounts of electricity more appropriate for heavy-duty refrigeration than data processing.
On edit: I remembered bloviating about this somewhere before and it turns out it was here. Souvenir photo reattached :-)
You don't happen to still have the light-up switch panel do you?
I've gathered some lighter, plastic reels, planning to mount them on continuous rotation servos. This project is all about creating the "look" for the old tape drive system. I figure a behind the scenes Propeller should be perfect for this project. I'm also planning to create something that is wall mounted with a depth of about 5 inches. This way I can achieve the look of an "in wall" unit without it actually taking up real-estate in my shop. Cool poster huh?
The old nine track tape drives were lots of fun. If you wrote your I/O instructions correctly, you could make them sing, make laser and phaser sounds, all kinds of neat stuff! You could make quite a racket in a computer room late at night!!
They could really move tape too when you got them going.
Jeff, if you make a replica, don't forget the vacuum channels in the front that did the tape tensioning - that was the coolest part of the whole drive.
Arrrgh, sorry Jeff. The switch panel got submerged in Katrina. (On the floor in the garage, only bit of water I got.) I do recall that the switches weren't mechanical switches; I suspect they were something exotic like Hall Effect. No expense being spared and all that. Anyway I couldn't figure out how to detect the fact that the buttons were pressed so that was one reason I didn't give saving it a high priority.
You guys are going to laugh, but I really, really want one of those tape machines behind them in my lab. Building a mock unit is on my bucket list. I've been collecting photographs and parts.
Jeff
Actually, what you "REALLY REALLY" want is a surplus RO-280 4 bay disk drive. I forget how many K-byte each pack had on it, but It was an IBM with all those little cards with the littler silver logic blocks on them. The heads were HYDRAULIC driven. No voice coils, no steppers. One of the worst problems I ever solved on one of these was a head latch magnet which would hold the heads loaded past a certain point. They would randomly drop and cause unload. Major pain. All because of a fatigued latch magnet wire lead. Stripped a spare head lead to repair until end of cruise when they were removed permanently............
Of course if your heart is really set on a tape unit, you would really love to get your hands on an Rd-358 Mag tape subsystem.
I will have to try and find a photo of my setup at home.taht I had from about 1977-2000. I had a Singer/ICL minicomputer with a tape drive and 3 x 10MB disk drives. Memory was core and I had the maximum configuration of 110KB where a byte was 6bit ASCII (upercase only). The tape drive was quite similar to the ones shown in the video, and the disc drives were 19" 6 high platters (removable). Each disk drive was the size of a washing machine. I purchased my computer when it was 18 months old. It ran without failures until I disconnected it in 2000. It was the length of my garage - it actually was housed in my garage - sealed and air-conditioned originally.
I used to teach hardware maintenance and programming on these computers in Australia and New Zealand.
I also later bought newer machines second hand.
Unfortunately I sold these in 2000 for scrap and they were shipped to China to recover the gold from the connectors
erco
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If I am not mistaken Ken here also wears a Bow Tie .
Win!
Jeff
Have you specced out the motors?
A long time ago I took apart a DEC RP04 mainframe disk drive ( http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/rp04.html ). It got donated to the local Goodwill, which slapped a $250 price tag on it which stayed there for a year. Finally they got tired of looking at it and slapped a SALE $15 price tag on top of that, and I whipped out my wallet. (Cost $35 to rent the trailer I needed to get the thing home). The cake-sized disk platters were powered by a two horsepower three-phase motor. The power plate demanded 30 amps at 240 VAC. The heads were driven in and out by a 3 inch diameter voice coil working against a 50 pound cylindrical magnet. There was a card cage with about 20 square feet of mostly TTL and DTL circuit boards (not counting the read head amplifiers, which were in a special low noise box.) Tracks were located by a linear optical encoder with an etched glass code plate. The main power suply transformer weighed 70 pounds. It was awe inspiring to see how much hardware was poured into the task of storing 80 megabytes of data and getting it back in 50 milliseconds. Took me two days to completely disassemble and while I still have a lot of the parts they're mostly souvenirs.
The thing is, big iron was big IRON. Heavy stuff moved past powered by incredibly powerful motors and amounts of electricity more appropriate for heavy-duty refrigeration than data processing.
On edit: I remembered bloviating about this somewhere before and it turns out it was here. Souvenir photo reattached :-)
I've gathered some lighter, plastic reels, planning to mount them on continuous rotation servos. This project is all about creating the "look" for the old tape drive system. I figure a behind the scenes Propeller should be perfect for this project. I'm also planning to create something that is wall mounted with a depth of about 5 inches. This way I can achieve the look of an "in wall" unit without it actually taking up real-estate in my shop. Cool poster huh?
Jeff
They could really move tape too when you got them going.
Jeff, if you make a replica, don't forget the vacuum channels in the front that did the tape tensioning - that was the coolest part of the whole drive.
After all these years around computers I had never heard of Corbat
Actually, what you "REALLY REALLY" want is a surplus RO-280 4 bay disk drive. I forget how many K-byte each pack had on it, but It was an IBM with all those little cards with the littler silver logic blocks on them. The heads were HYDRAULIC driven. No voice coils, no steppers. One of the worst problems I ever solved on one of these was a head latch magnet which would hold the heads loaded past a certain point. They would randomly drop and cause unload. Major pain. All because of a fatigued latch magnet wire lead. Stripped a spare head lead to repair until end of cruise when they were removed permanently............
Of course if your heart is really set on a tape unit, you would really love to get your hands on an Rd-358 Mag tape subsystem.
I used to teach hardware maintenance and programming on these computers in Australia and New Zealand.
I also later bought newer machines second hand.
Unfortunately I sold these in 2000 for scrap and they were shipped to China to recover the gold from the connectors