Random Access Tape 2447

After reflection I'm willing to yield some ground on this, but "bullpoo" is hardly justfied. And you're an butt.

Of course. Who hasn't pulled one of those things apart?

Continuous tape makes no difference in this matter, as far as I'm concerned. Loops and strips both permit one-dimensional media access only.

Yes; when I originally responded I was thinking only of the continu- ous-loop characteristic, and not the multiple tracks. (Cbuttette tape also has multiple tracks - four of them, for left- and right-audio on each side of the cbuttette, but the head doesn't scan.)

I'll grant that is topologically the same as a four-track disk, but relying on topology alone is a far too limited model.

Multiple tracks are no different, in principle, from multiple tapes, on separate devices or on a device with a tape-switching capability (such as an operator).

There's obviously a continuum from "efficient" random-access devices to inefficient, mostly-sequential ones like tapes - including 8-track. And the degree of efficiency is a function of the ratio of the two dimensions of I-O positioning. Tape devices, including the 8-track, are characterized by a ratio far from 1; there are many more units per track than there are tracks. That makes them predominantly sequential, or "nearly one-dimensional", or "long and thin". I stand by that definition.

Disk devices, on the other hand, are practical only when they have a ratio of tracks to units-per-track that's much larger than those for tape devices. That makes them predominantly random-access and effectively two-dimensional. (In practice, of course, disk devices usually have multiple platters, making them effectively three- dimensional; and are often used in combination, making them four- dimensional; and so on.)

Perhaps, but I'm happy with my amended definition, above.

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Most people believe that anything that is true is true for a reason. These theorems show that some things are true for no reason at all, i.e., accidentally, or at random. -- G J Chaitin