Andertoons by Mark Anderson for January 28, 2024

6250 characters per inch is the way!

There was a server command to mount tape. A tech would have to retrieve the magnetic tape and put it on the computer’s tape machine.

He’s playing an old, High School recording of Oppenheimer reciting the value of PI to 120 decimal places.

At 800bpi you could put a little ferrite dust gizmo on the tape and read the data bits by eye.

This is reel-to-reel funny?

Thirty-five years ago, I worked on a company’s project that included replacing nine-inch data tapes with hard drives. One of the senior managers asked me how many seconds it takes to rewind a data file on a hard drive. He didn’t believe my “couple of milliseconds” answer.

Nothing quite like an IBMB 3420 with its vacuum columns!

Video killed the radio star, too… Didn’t it?!

Obviously drawn by someone who never had to unsnarl a reel-to-reel tape.

I’ve worked with many types of magnetic tape, from audio reel-reel, compact cassette, 9 track data tapes, cartridges of several types, then on to diskettes of several densities and sizes. Hard drives from 340K with fixed 8-inch platters that were a b—tch to replace, to 5 inch, easily replaced to 3 inch plug-in, to SSDs that will fit in a pocket. Along the way I used magnetic “bubble” memory, punched paper tape, USB “thumb” drives, SD cards, and Micro SD cards. Tech changes so fast, it’s hard to keep up.