Random Access Tape 2456
'Steve O'Hara-Smith' That's what the tape dangling in the vacuum is for. The idea is the tape stops dead and the pickup spool reels in the tape in the vacuum chamber (I forget the proper name) as it stops and the other spool spills tape into the vacuum chamber on the other side. Then the fiddle to set both vacuum chambers about half full.
The vacuumn loop columns have (had) vacuumn switches that keep track of the tape loop length (roughly.) The vacuum connection is at the bottom of the column with air pressure sensors placed at various distances from the top. The tape reel motors are controlled by the function (load, rewind, fast foward, advance, back up, ...) and the goldilocks status of the tape loops. The loop allows the heavy reel and reel motors time to accelerate and decelerate without snapping the tape or rolling streamers across A very light capstan moves the tape past the R-W head during I-O, with the capstan pressure relieved during rewind and fast foward. At least with the Univac, Honeywell, and IBM equipment I used.
toober' To pick nits, they were not bits... That system was trinary - hole, no-hole, or notch. There is a pretty good book from the 1950s that...
Peter Flbutt Not to my knowledge. Yes, Multics standard tape format had a block number in each block, and the tape DIM noticed an error if...
Phil Weldon
Mike Ross Hehehe. In my branch of the service (USAF) we had Burroughs, Sperry, Univac, DEC, around 25,000 reels of tape (I was stationed where...
On Sat, 12 Nov 05 12:45:04 GMT That's what the tape dangling in the vacuum is for. The idea is the tape stops dead and the pickup spool reels in the tape in the vacuum chamber (I forget the proper name) as it stops and the other spool spills tape into the vacuum chamber on the other side. Then the fiddle to set both vacuum chambers about half full. -- The computer obeys and wins. A better way to focus the sun You lose and Bill collects. licences available see
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