Re^2: Turing's Cathedral

Yes! And we had pre-punched adhesive splices for when the reader mangled a tape. Also had a small manual punch that would allow punching one hole at a time. The expensive mylar tape was reserved for the critical programs. I once spent 24 hours straight reloading a fixed head disk from fanfold paper tape. Then it was discovered that the tapes weren't the most current versions. One system function was never recovered. This brought on the installation of 800bpi magnetic tape drives at about $10k each.

James

There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over...

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Re^3: Turing's Cathedral by BillKSmith (Monsignor) on Jul 05, 2013 at 03:56 UTC
OK, I admit it. I left out the part about the splicing tape and hole punch. I think I could still find the inspection gauge for checking perferated tapes for hole size, spacing and registration. Bill	[reply]
Re^4: Turing's Cathedral by jmlynesjr (Deacon) on Jul 07, 2013 at 19:26 UTC
LOL, the gauge is something that we didn't have. We did have small spray cans of iron filings in a solvent that you could spray on a magnetic tape to "look" at the bits. We had drives from several manufacturers that didn't like to play nice with each other. Alignment was very tricky to get the tapes to be interchangeable between systems - Honeywell 516 and Data General Nova IIs mostly. James There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over...	[reply]