IBM and HP 9-track tape drives in operation
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- čas přidán 19. 12. 2013
- This video is showing two old 9-track tape SCSI drives in classic operation. Such tape reels and drives were ordinary used in mainframe era back in 1970's and 1980's.
...and I am very proud of having these two vintage and working ones. :-)
Tape drive on the right side was manufactured by Hewlett-Packard in 1995 and has manual tape loading. It also requires special power transformer, because it's voltage is around 60 volts DC.
Second tape drive (left side) was manufactured by IBM in 1991. It has very nice automatic tape loading by air stream. Presence of tape is detected by optical sensors.
Both drives are connected to a standard PC with two SCSI host adapters, because "IBM" is High Voltage differential (HVD) and "HP" is standard low voltage differential, single ended (LVD SE). Those devices cannot be on same bus - damaged could occur!!! This PC is running Linux, because it has native support for SCSI tape drives.
First you can see loading tape media, than writing some files by TAR. After automatic rewind back to beginning of tape are listed stored files. And finally comes soft unload by MT command.
Overall size of backed-up files was up to 30MB. Total capacity of such tape is 170MB (10,5" tape reel in IBM drive). - Věda a technologie
Holy crap that vacuum tape threading thing is awesome :)
Yes
Yes
Yes 😊
Holy shit, it loads itself! Really impressive bit of hardware!
He told the drives what to look for and that's why it's autoloading
+HappyMuffinz Fan the auto loading drive actually does just that - it loads itself.
Automatic loading mechanism literally means that no human intervention is required.
It loads the tape on it's reels, or otherwise it gets the hose :)))))))
This is probably how a reel to reel would work if they had one for your car. It would thread itself while you are changing lanes...
God I love vintage electronics...
I mean really, they are in some cases useful; they are also in a way more secure due to a lack of equipment you can easily get a hold of to even read the data on the tapes...
People please keep you vintage artifacts...
Feeding mechanism .... priceless !
Hell yeah men
I love watching those old machines. My dad used to work with older ones in the 70's and 80's. I was always fascinated by them!
That is some finely tuned equipment to be able to thread the tape like that. Cool retro-technology!
Great to see old equipment working with modern system. Love Linux :)
I love that guys like you are uploading videos such as these and keeping this hardware alive.
Thank you!
I didn't think I'd ever see those wonderfully clever self-threading tape drives do their wonderful thing again. Thank you so much for preserving this. Two thumbs and one toe up!
This is so cool! You didn't even have to scan the tape manually to find what you need. The computer was doing the hardest part for you, you just had to wait for it and eventually it would give you the result. It was slow, but it wasn't slower than the Commodore, which used conventional compact cassettes and standard tape decks, where you had to press Play and wait for a long time for the data to be found and you couldn't rush it. Here instead, the computer knows exactly where to look on the tape.
It's 35 years ago that i used to load tapes as a temp job for an insurance company. We also had the heavy disk packs and older style tape reals.
This is why gzip and bzip etc are built into tar. It's wayyy faster to stream one huge long file out to tape than small individual records. Hence why the tape was seeking back and forth, writing just a few records at a time. Try gzipping first and watch how much faster it transfers!
Wow! Nice! :D I didn't know automatic loading existed, that's cool!
Wow, I didn't know they were still making reel-to-reel tape drives in the 1990s.
These were still in use in the finance industry up until around 1995/1996. I used to be the Sysadmin for a finance house - and I'd cut the client statements on a Saturday morning, for printing monthly, to tapes like this. The tapes would then get shipped to a company called Reynolds & Renolds for printing.
I was surprised to see an HP sticker on the IBM-branded 9-track drive (I was an AS/400 operator back in the Paleolithic Age).
This is how I want to store my data...I need a building full of tapes and a staff of librarians to retrieve my files when I want to do my 3D work...
Dang man! Thats some cool stuff!! Certanly a lot cooler than boring old DLT and LTO tape :-)
But I can backup my hdd with one boring LTO cartridge. ;)
I still have 4 of the IBM 9348s. One when I got it was brand new still in the IBM packaging.
It's amazing how they adjust themselves without any human interference!
I envy you man, that's so AWESOME!
Man, I'm amazed that the slot-loaded tape drive can just pick up the tape and thread it all on its own!
That's one way to save your music collection...
Very nice technology and quality 80; year
Amazing, I love to see this stuff!
This is Just awesome! This kind of old stuffs impress me 😊
Zajímavý způsob zavádění pásku :D
Very nice!
Wow, great! Have a Qualstar drive but have to either hack together my own 62-pin interface or get an old PC with ISA slots. Love the vacuum autoloader on the HP drive.
The white tape drive on the left, the Inland Revenue Service in the UK still used these in 1999!
I like your HP Laptop/terminal.
I was recording radar data with a simmilar machine as this one to the right in 1998 at a German air forces facility.
Greatest video on CZcams
The song in the background is Tears(Aurosonic Progressive Mix) - Headstrong, Stine Grove, Aurosonic
Here after 14" Winchester drive
Not content with eight, IBM added a ninth track. Some say they went too far, venturing places Man was not meant to go.
I do love a machine that is started with a metal clip lol
It looks like you saved an image and an MP3 onto that drive. can you play it back from the drive or is that asking too much of the technology?
This magic of the tape is the reason, why we was so exciting for the computer and now, who is the magic? Is he gone with a Wind?
That's perfect,
Maybe it will sound stupid but this drives are actualy manufactured today and big companies mostly use them for backup. This tapes now come in capacity of over 100tb,with speeds of around 200mb,depending on the density
+Dorian Andirijic IBM TS1150 10TB storage 360mb something something.
Those are entirely different drives and entirely diferent tapes.
The original 9 track tapes are long gone.
But there are new tape storage technologies.
holy crap get me one
not because i like storage but I have a real boner for tape drives...
A lot of these tape drives were OEM'd by the Telex corporation of Tulsa, OK. I know because I worked on the assembly line.
I can't help but question your taste in music.
I have a rather inexpensive Overland tape drive. Quite an interesting bit of kit. Though mine is quite a lot slower than either of these units. Mine is also scsi 2 narrow.
Because screw SSDs!
AIO inc. What are you loading by the way? It looks like some sort of Linux or Unix terminal to me. Possible some form of CP/M or DOS?
+AIO inc.
Either Linux or HP-UX. Don't know which, but both will work.
douro20
Any idea how I can emulate one of these?
You can build custom hardware to emulate a tape drive; it's been done with an Arduino.
douro20
Software wise?
song name?
Headstrong feat. Stine Grove - Tears (Aurosonic Progressive Mix)
used to repair those for Datapoint...
Why does the right one keep clicking the head and going forward and backward? I'd think for a copy operation it'd just go until all the data had been recorded, then do whatever file-allocation stuff necessary.
Normally it was used for store big "chunks" of data, in this case he used several small files (mp3, jpg), so the unit keeps rewinding to find end of previous block...so tis was not exact preview of ordinary usage for long therm data backup.
Hi there. I remember using these guys back in school and thinking how cool it was. Is this guy able to actually read data from the tape
?
The mechanics of both of those tape drives are the same, manufactured by HP in the late 80s. In particular, your IBM drive is an OEMed HP 88780, with a custom control panel. Both of those drives have those clicking noises when the tape reverses; it's a bar that lifts the tape off the head to avoid sticky situations. They work the same way and bar basically the same drive.
I have an 88780 that looks very much like your IBM drive, but with the control panel from your HP. The difference seems to be that your upright drive lacks autoloading.
+Jeff Woolsey
The M4 Data 9914 is also a very similar drive to the HP autoloaders, but it supports more tape formats.
What model of laptop is that if you know? I can't make out the model number in the video.
What did you have on the computer to interface the IBM 9-track drive?
That's nice.
I have few several tapes of this type in 3 diameters, like 10 of them are mint, never used and still sealed. I wonder what I could use them for.
How much can cost such drive?
And what port do they use?
The problem is, tapes optimized for digital data sound like shit when analogue music is recorded on them. I tried with streamer cassettes in a regular cassette player, no go.
Yeah, digital needs as little linearity as possible, audio needs as much as possible (greatly simplified, but mostly true)
What model is the IBM with the autoloader?
Can you please tell me about the r/w speed?
I have the HP which works fine when it is loaded but sometimes it struggles to load correctly. I am not sure if ti's the tape or some other issue.
That back and forth spooling, is that a bad block in the tape or something?
The HP tape drive has some issue. It is still retrying to write. Reading works fine.
Format Machines and Matrix Machines are mainframes that are both reliable, but I learned that Matrix Mainframes are safer. Less interfering in the coding they say. Remarks are liked. Kind regards.
How many megabytes per second can you get sequentially out of these machines?
At best 0.7 (769 KB/sec)... Usually more in the 240KB/s...
You only need 176 kilobytes per second for linear PCM CD quality audio. If you're running Linux and GCC you could probably make a homebrew digital studio audio recorder, back from the time when mixtapes were round, but digital.
Logan Jamison your thinking too early. Back then was when IBM rolled out their 279 vacuum tape drive collum. they are awesome machines though, even if the 1401 can't multiply for shit xD
these things were a pain in the ass too maintain . they were replaced by the hard drive thank god but I guess back then that's all there was .
Much more interesting to watch than a hard drive though.
had aprentancship where i was taking the tapes off the machines and putting new ones on and sending backups to a remote storage outfit and loging them back in. got whacked over the head by one when it didnt mount properly on its rack. ouch. was sent home .
I'm thinking at 6520 bits per second you could do a 128K MP3 recording with good forward error correction at 3-3/4 inches per second. I have an Akai GX-400D which sounds about that good at that speed, but is analog. On the analog an 1800 foot reel would hold 3 hours and 12 minutes of music going to 16 kHz frequency response. 9 tracks with no flipping over should give you 90 minutes of similar quality compressed digital audio. (Note: A 128K MP3 file also drops off at exactly 16.0 kilohertz).
Now imagine, if a digital music needs so much tape to be stored, and on analogue tape you can store much, much more songs, why in the name of all gods people still claim analogue is better, if the songs are crammed on the same space used by one digital file...
@@SFtheGreat That made no sense on so many levels
@@0raffie0 Elaborate then.
1988??
What is the name of the song in the background?
Headstrong feat. Stine Grove - Tears (Aurosonic Progressive Mix)
It was not meant to be a background song. I was just listening during work...
@@Najd2 cool! it reminded me of "Missing" by Everything but the girl.
name of song?
Headstrong feat. Stine Grove - Tears (Aurosonic Progressive Mix)
How come they did not use disk drives
because tape drives are meant for archival storage and are very durable but HDDs degrade over time if they are not used and dont have as much storage space
HDDs don't degrade like SSDs do (which your probably confused with) but they do break often
@@joemAwesomeMan They degrade over time when not used... the bearings needs more lubricant; the heads get magnetized too strongly or gets sticky, etc. So much can go bad with a hard drive left in storage for years. (except the 20mb 1st generation mfm drives no drive is known to last 30 years)
true @@joelpichette
Where can I get one?
whyyy did you have to have the music playing in the background, I could have used this as an audio clip
Well, I always listen to music at my workroom. It is not meant to be an audio clip for this video.
Anyone an idea what model types those are ?
Left: IBM 9348-001
Right: HP 88781
can it run crysis?
How annoying would it be if part of your program was near the start and near the end.
is it just me that hates Memorex tapes and think scotch built the best 9track tapes?
are you Sell it??!!
Do*
Definitely not!
speech 100
But can it run doom....
Some commentary should be nice.
Pls gib.