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  • Tfw you've worked in a data center that still had reel to reels in use.

    • In the 90's I worked for a printed circuit board manufacturer that used paper tape drives to load the base "OS" into their CNC machines.

      Paper tape is essentially punched cards on a 1" wide paper tape on a reel-to-reel setup. I think it used an optical reader.

      Those amazing eggheads figured out how to transform 3D cad drawings from their engineer's computers into a data stream the CNC machines understood, and somehow added networking to those CNC controllers that were from the Apollo era (the paper tape systems). Wish I had the sense to take a pic with a disposable camera at the time. I don't even know what to search for to show it.

      Edit: This controller is similar to what I saw in the nineties, but looks even newer! Haha

      Note the paper tape drive.

    • Oooh, I love tales from the ancient times.

      My professor in college had worked with punch cards. He told us about dropping a box full of cards once, and so having to repeat the process of printing them out again.

      • I'm pretty sure anyone who's ever worked with punch cards has a story about dropping them lol. The old heads I trained under had no shortage of said stories.

        So far as my tales, they're not so ancient. Imagine, if you will, old Uncle Funk, still relatively fresh-faced after getting laid off from his first professional gig in the aftermath of the dot com bubble bursting. He lands on his feet in a mid-sized company, working entry level data clerk crap because he's had enough of PC repair and Y2K patches in a year and a half to last a lifetime. And one afternoon in walks a gentleman with a small box, who the person training him introduces as the courier from a business partner. They exchange pleasantries and get down to the heart of the matter: the logging of several reel to reel tapes coming in and going out. Considering we just started the 21st century, he finds this a bit odd. But lo! We deliver the tapes to the computer room operators, who take them over to tape drives straight out of the set of Superman 3. Mind blown.

        Fast forward a year or so and Uncle Funk has joined the grizzled vets in the data center, learning the ins and outs of OS/390, print queues, and batch processing. And those reel to reels are still in daily use for a handful of jobs (with the vast majority of tape functions being handled by vast stacks of 3490s). By the time he left for greener pastures, those tapes for inter-company use had been superseded by 3.5" floppies (briefly) and then ultra-modern FTP transfer. Ah, progress.

6 comments