I thought I recognized these.
I thought I recognized these.
M... Kay...
Don’t crinkle the tape
So all things old is new again?
I hated magnetic tape back in the day: was extremely unreliable and potentially disastrous in terms of lost data. I was so happy to find read-write capabilities with CD-ROMs.
Pfft - that’s easy - just make it a longer tape, DUH!
Will it work in my cassette recorder?
The world currently produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily
The 1970s "old joke" referred to above was told to this poster in the NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab cafeteria in about 1975-1976. He worked in the Digital Maintenance group in the JPL Space Flight Operations Center from 1974 to 1978.
The story / joke was a classic regularly used at JPL to explain ping time, and differentiate bandwidth from latency (and, by the way, the need to document where your cables ran, and that you needed to distribute your data circuits across multiple cables in different trenches - or somehow via multiple paths).
The NASA Deep Space Network tracking station at Goldstone is just outside of Fort Irwin, just east of Barstow, California. When you leave the highway you have to go through Fort Irwin to get to any of the Goldstone facilities. Depending on the highway route taken, and which Deep Space Network dish at Goldstone you are driving to (or starting from) it was about 160-185 miles (255-298 km) from JPL. At freeway speeds (65 mph, about 100 km/h) it was a minimum of three-and-a-half hours, usually four, and frequently more, depending on the traffic. If you ignored the speed limit while out in the desert (risky) you could get closer to three and-a-half hours. This distance and speed also explained how the "ping time" was 7 to 8 hours. Several of the freeways now in existence were not there then.
At the time (early 1970s), the data links from JPL to Goldstone ranged from as low as 1200 and 2400 bps (several of each) to 9600 bps (one or two). The 9-track magnetic tapes of the day recorded at a maximum density of 6250 bits per inch (but some older drives were limited to 800 or 1600 bits per inch). The tape reels were made in different sizes, the largest held about 2400 feet of tape, but due to the data being written in records, with gaps between the records, the maximum data capacity of a 2400 foot reel, blocked at 32,767 bytes per record and recorded at 6250 BPI was 170 megabytes per reel.
As the story that your contributor heard went, one day a plumbing contractor's backhoe dug up and broke the underground cable that carried ALL of the JPL-to-Goldstone data and voice lines through Fort Irwin, and it would take at least a day, maybe longer, to repair. So someone was designated to drive two boxes of 12 reels each of magnetic tape down to JPL, and quickly. The first available vehicle was a white NASA station wagon. Hence the punch line: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway".
Rounding off the numbers, twenty-four reels of tape at 170 megabytes each is 4080 megabytes. Three and a half hours is 210 minutes. 4080 megabytes divided by 210 works out to about 19.4 megabytes per minute, or 32.3 kilobytes per second (258.4kilobits per second) - over 100 times faster than a 2400 bps data circuit of the time. Note that the incident above involved only 24 reels - which didn't come anywhere near filling the station wagon, in fact the two boxes of tapes didn't even fill the front passenger seat. (as an aside, a station wagon is known as an estate car or estate in other parts of the world). Incidentally, that conversation was the first time your contributor ever heard the term backhoe fade used to describe accidental massive damage to an underground cable (compare it to the term rain fade used to describe a fade-out of a point-to-point microwave radio path due to the absorptive effect of water in the air).
Now if they could invent Polaroid instamatic film...
A couple more parameters whould be of interest:
1. What is the access time?
2. What is the read/write cycle time?
3. How much is overhead, particularly for error-correction?
I knew I shoulda kept that 8-track player in my car.
this made my blood run cold.
IBM will charge you $10,000,000 for the tape drive, and $200,000 a year in support to keep the hopelessly unreliable thing going less than half the time.
DC Directors will cover their a$$es by archiving their archives.
Who gives a crap, where’s my quantum computer tablet?
If I can’t use it sitting on the couch, I don’t care.
I really don’t understand IBM’s math. You would think that a tape with 317 GB (that’s about a third of a terabyte) per square inch, at 1255 meters (that’s 50,000 inches) long would store a lot more than 580 terabytes. If it were 1 inch wide that would be about 17,000 TB.
To be “only” 580 TB the tape would have to be .03 inches wide. Wouldn’t it snap?
This is very bad news for freedom. 5G especially must be stopped and taken out to keep from accelerating the current monitoring and control abuses.
So we’re going back to floppy disks?
Anther way to control information and history
Once everything is moved to some form of digital or virtual storage and the hard copies are made unavailable all access to information will be controlled by those who manufacture and/or control the equipment to retrieve and convert the data.
The way ballot information is now controlled and manipulated by the Dominion voting machines and software.
What good is an 8-track music tape or a Beta video tape to someone without the equipment to read the data on the tapes?
What good are all the files people stored on old style 5” floppy discs without a device that can read the discs?
Even worse - what about information stored in the “Cloud”?
It’s not yours anymore - it’s “Theirs”.
For now they may let you access it but that access is not under your control.
At any moment, by intention or accident, you can be denied access to your own information.
An EMP would take out the tape, not the CDs...
I wish I had known that storage of media would become such an important job. If I had known that 40 years, that would have been a good job for me.
It will be a flop unless the porn industry adopts it. Porn is the true driver of technology success.