I got to see the tape room for one Hughes Aircraft facility in the early 80’s.
Imagine a wall that is 30 feet high, covered with three stories of IBM vacuum column 9-tracks. Each row of tape drives had, I dunno, 10 drives. This whole thing was underground in SoCal.
Along one wall, there was a HUGE light board with numbers set up in columns and rows. The “runners” would look up on the board to see what tape number to pull - and off to the stacks they’d run. Some jobs were asking for multiple tapes, and the runners who were smart (so I was told) would wait to see all the volume numbers for a job go up on the board before they’d take off. Woe unto the runner who would mount only some of the tapes needed by a job. The operators wanted all the tapes for a job to be hung at once - ie, to not get into a situation where one tape for a three-tape job was hung, and there were no available drives to hang the other two until other jobs completed.
I guess they had about two dozen runners to make sure that tapes were pulled, hung and put back into the racks with sufficient dispatch. That’s all these kids did - pass a security clearance and run 9-track tapes up and down the aisles and stairs. They didn’t do much else other than run, really. Since the place ran 7x24, there were something like four shifts of these runners - three shifts and spares for holidays, weekends and sick days.
Then there were operators on consoles who would direct the OS to mount/unmount the tapes, let the user’s job proceed, etc. I guess there were about six of those guys, all sitting on chairs with wheels, whizzing up and down a row of console 3270’s tied into the multiple mainframes. Again, three shifts’ worth of people were needed.
I never did get a straight answer from the HAC people as to how many computers tied into this tape room. “You don’t need to know,” was their answer. I’d never seen a larger computing installation before, and I’ve never seen a similar one since. All those people are likely gone now, replaced by systems like the robotic tape library you detailed. It was a most impressive installation, and trying to describe it to younger people in computing now just gets a puzzled look. Trying to describe what it was like to submit a job that required operators mount drives/tapes/etc for you — kids today just have no concept that you could submit a job and get results hours or even a day later.
My facility in San Diego has 5 floors with 110,000 square feet of
raised computer floor. What I described earlier was
the tape library supporting one of about 50 systems
supporting the business systems for PacBell in southern
CA. There is a similar facility in Hayward for the
northern half.
The original 9-track setup for just the small Amdahl
shop looked like an orchestra pit. The tape drives
were arrayed in a semi-circle with 6 levels. Each
tape drive had an electronic display for the tape
volume number needed. The operator consoles
were located where they could see all the drives.
The tape runners had to go to an adjacent room
to fetch the tapes. There were often 6 to 10
runners on duty depending on the schedule of
jobs to run.
It was time to automate that process. Thanks for
sharing your observation. That was a pretty large
facility.