Stéphane Charette 🇨🇦 on Nostr: I recall as a child in the 1970s going to visit my father at his job at IBM. He'd ...

I recall as a child in the 1970s going to visit my father at his job at IBM. He'd bring me into rooms like this with rows of these tape drives:



Each drive was the size of a refrigerator. The bottom 3/4 of the drives was a vacuum chamber where the tape spool would unroll several feet of tape, while the read head on the other side would suck it back up as fast as it could read. So one side would make loud stop-and-go noises. When the "U" was too short, another few rotations of tape would unwind. The front of each device was a glass panel so you could see the tape unwind and wind back up. Multiplied by maybe 50 of these machines in a room.

My father was a mainframe developer. He'd call down to the operators, and tell them to load tape #123 into a drive so he could run his apps.

He'd bring several tapes with him on business trips. It was faster for IBM to fly him and the tapes to other countries than it was to transfer the contents over IBM's communication networks.

quoting
nevent1q…0hms

Hi #retrocomputing experts! One of my colleagues at the French national archives wonders what these tapes are!

Bonus point if you have any clue about how to retrieve data from them...