Bulkiest removable storage media?

In article .com,
Tim Shoppa wrote:
What's the bulkiest removable storage media? Drums etc. don't count
because you don't often switch the drum (although they certainly could
be heavy judging by nothing but the size of the bearings). I worked
with RP06 packs and some funky optical tape reels in the past, but
those were pretty measly compared to some others I have seen or heard
about:

Removeable or moveable?
Cargo container. It is the next corporate form factor.
The Internet Archive started the Petabyte box project a few years back
when Brewster realized that disk was reaching $1K/TB. The last I heard
it was slightly side tracked but others have apparently done it for the
Persian Gulf (someone for like Bechtel or some customer like that), it's
web searchable. Contained cooling and communication.

Something like $2.5M for a PB. Brewster hired Bruce who also worked on
the IBM Ice Cube project (cute, I've seen it, it's just not going to go
any where like many things at the IBM Research Centers [this has friends
bummed]). All this stuff is on the web.

I like their (IA's) idea that this was going to be mass storage for the
up and coming start ups. They were going to skip the traditional big
users of storage like the National Labs and go for internet firms.
It appeared to be Brewster's 3rd fortune. They did the guts for 1 but
it started to become safer for fault tolerance and redundancy to
separate and not concentrate the bits. Just a matter of time.

An IMAX 3-D reel can be 350 pounds and even the projector room even
Yes and cargo containers likewise has special fork lifts for
them as well.
An SSEC "paper tape" reel was punched-card-width stock not cut into

Any other bulkier examples I'm missing?

Well, I've seen NCAR's 60 lb. Ampex tape cartridges and there is a
Harvest cartridge at the Natl. Crypto Museum at the Fort.
But when you are talking weight it depends on silly one wants to get.
I suspect that we've seen nothing yet.

--

On Jun 14, 2:10 pm, (Eugene Miya) wrote:
In article .com,
Tim Shoppa wrote:

What's the bulkiest removable storage media? Drums etc. don't count
because you don't often switch the drum (although they certainly could
be heavy judging by nothing but the size of the bearings). I worked
with RP06 packs and some funky optical tape reels in the past, but
those were pretty measly compared to some others I have seen or heard
about:

Removeable or moveable?
Cargo container. It is the next corporate form factor.
The Internet Archive started the Petabyte box project a few years back
when Brewster realized that disk was reaching $1K/TB. The last I heard
it was slightly side tracked but others have apparently done it for the
Persian Gulf (someone for like Bechtel or some customer like that), it's
web searchable. Contained cooling and communication.

Something like $2.5M for a PB. Brewster hired Bruce who also worked on
the IBM Ice Cube project (cute, I've seen it, it's just not going to go
any where like many things at the IBM Research Centers [this has friends
bummed]). All this stuff is on the web.

I like their (IA's) idea that this was going to be mass storage for the
up and coming start ups. They were going to skip the traditional big
users of storage like the National Labs and go for internet firms.
It appeared to be Brewster's 3rd fortune. They did the guts for 1 but
it started to become safer for fault tolerance and redundancy to
separate and not concentrate the bits. Just a matter of time.

An IMAX 3-D reel can be 350 pounds and even the projector room even

Yes and cargo containers likewise has special fork lifts for
them as well.

An SSEC "paper tape" reel was punched-card-width stock not cut into

Any other bulkier examples I'm missing?

Well, I've seen NCAR's 60 lb. Ampex tape cartridges and there is a
Harvest cartridge at the Natl. Crypto Museum at the Fort.
But when you are talking weight it depends on silly one wants to get.
I suspect that we've seen nothing yet.

--

NCAR's tape system was Ampex's Terabit Memory System
(TBM) had 2 drives per rack an each removal tape reel
weighed about 12 lbs each, IIRC. Each reel contained
25,000 ft of 2" wide tape, 44 gigabits.

Walter Bushell wrote:

In article ,
Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:

Quadibloc writes:
I never heard of an IBM peripheral like that, but I know somebody made
a multi-floppy pack with something similar for the early microcomputer
world. It didn't stay very popular, but it was out there for a little
while.

well before the start of steep decline in hard disk prices (and well
before cdroms)

'80 Mbytes of storage for under $12k!' and other ad favorites through the
years

http://www.computerworld.com/action/...leBasic&articl
eId=9023960

AND 30 day delivery!

I'm still somewhat in awe of the fact that the new Micro Center store in
northern New Jersey can afford to hand out 2 GB flash memory devices as
promotional swag. (They sent out a mailing a couple of weeks ago: one per
customer with the mailing flyer, but also a 1 GB freebee for a friend with
the pass-along card from the flyer. Your choice of card or USB stick.
Admittedly, the stick came with that dreadful U3 software and I had to
borrow a Windows machine to reflash its firmware to get rid of it.)

--
Roland Hutchinson Will play viola da gamba for food.

NB mail to my.spamtrap [at] verizon.net is heavily filtered to
remove spam. If your message looks like spam I may not see it.

Walter Bushell wrote:
In article ,
Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:

Quadibloc writes:
I never heard of an IBM peripheral like that, but I know somebody made
a multi-floppy pack with something similar for the early microcomputer
world. It didn't stay very popular, but it was out there for a little
while.
well before the start of steep decline in hard disk prices (and well
before cdroms)

'80 Mbytes of storage for under $12k!' and other ad favorites through the
years
http://www.computerworld.com/action/...leBasic&articl
eId=9023960

AND 30 day delivery!

somewhat offtopic: I liked the ad for the "Personal Mainframe" from 1981:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/...9&pageNumber=6

Larry Elmore wrote:
somewhat offtopic: I liked the ad for the "Personal Mainframe" from 1981:
..
Back then, that was indeed a clever idea for an ad.

But it's too bad that Digital *did* trademark the term...since today's
PCs, with hardware floating-point, caches, pipelining...are, or could
be, personal mainframes, particularly with Linux, a multi-user
operating system, running.

John Savard

Burroughs in the era of the B-220 (circa 1960) was using 3/4" magnetic
tape that was formatted to be block-addressable. Then as an alternative
to a tape drive they had a thing with a whole bunch of tape loops on
a long capstan, with a r/w head going from tape to tape, for a sort
of random-access device. I don't remember if the tape loop container
was removable. Nor do I know if any were actually made. Some years
later Potter advertised a similar device in which the container was
definitely removable.
--

jhhaynes at earthlink dot net

Jim Haynes wrote:

Burroughs in the era of the B-220 (circa 1960) was using 3/4" magnetic
tape that was formatted to be block-addressable. Then as an alternative
to a tape drive they had a thing with a whole bunch of tape loops on
a long capstan, with a r/w head going from tape to tape, for a sort
of random-access device. I don't remember if the tape loop container
was removable. Nor do I know if any were actually made. Some years
later Potter advertised a similar device in which the container was
definitely removable.

How about Hypertape?
(http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/mag...tape_Oct61.pdf)
The cartridge weighed 8.5lb and measured 17/10/2in.

You might check out NCR's CRAM.
512 3x14" cards had to be pretty bulky.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRAM

"Byron Myers" writes:
You might check out NCR's CRAM.
512 3x14" cards had to be pretty bulky.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRAM


http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#23 Bulkiest removable storage media?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#30 Bulkiest removable storage media?

the ibm photostore was somewhat compareable ... then the 2321 might be
considered an intermediate version of this (but with magnetic) ... and
the 3850 appeared to start out being a much larger follow-on ... except
using tape cartridges ... before 3850 turned into a virtual 3330,
hierarchical staging mechanism.

the large numbers of floppies spinning on single spindle was
sort of between 2321 and the 3850 ... but with mechanism that
was enormously simpler that either 2321 or 3850

recent discussion about "BB" in DASD addressing "BBCCHH" may have been
anticipated to be used in a progression of devices from the photostore,
to the 2321 datacell, and eventually the original 3850 design point
(before it was converted to virtual 3330 disk drive paradigm, and
applications no longer needed the "BB" field to directly address a 3850
cartridge).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#5 FBA rant
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#49 Drums: Memory or Peripheral?

Photo-digital storage system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360
http://www.computerhistory.org/virtu...id=02.07.01.00

2321 datacell
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/datacell.html
http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/engi...684/fig043.jpg

3850 MSS reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3850
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/mss.html

misc. past posts getting to play disk engineer in bldgs. 14&15
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#disk

there is some early folklore about fatality related to the high
acceleration and velocity of the 3850 robot mechanism ... leading to an
interlock on the robot mechanism whenever the access door was open.

Byron Myers wrote:

You might check out NCR's CRAM.
512 3x14" cards had to be pretty bulky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRAM


thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.f...2e0bc3 346aaf

http://tinyurl.com/3547he

I started at UNO in the spring of 1970, hired on the basis of my
experience as a crack operator on the U1108 RTOS at USAF GWC at
Offutt. The UNO computing center had just signed a contract
w/Univac for an 1106 (de-clocked 1108). About that time IBM
started throwing their political weight around, got the contract
annulled and made them get a M40, (I think). They had both the
315 and the M40 operating while I was there.

IIRC, the card, after being selected, fell by gravity down a
channel until it met the spinning drum, where a vacuum held it to
the drum for reading and writing. To release, I think fingers
picked it off the drum and inertia shot it back up the return
channel and a solenoid-operated plate smacked it back onto the
pack, suspended by the eight " lazy-'D' " rods which were the
selection mechanism.

If some of the address notches in the cards became flexed due to
wear, it was possible for more than one card to drop
simultaneously. The channel/drum gap wasn't quite wide enough for
two cards to pass, but since they both couldn't get to the gate
precisely at the same instant, one was offset from the other,
resulting in a wedge-jam just ahead of the drum, with one card
usually halfway around the drum, being chewed up as a result.

It made a characteristic whine, audible and recognizable
throughout the machine room. Many's the time I'd be sitting in
the ops mangager's office shooting the breeze when we'd hear the
siren-like sound of the jam. Someone would shout, "double-drop!!"
and we'd all rush out to the CRAM.

The first guy there would fling the door open, drop to his knees,
and without any hesitation (if you flinched you'd get your hand
chewed up) slam the heel of his hand against the outside edge of
the spinning r/w drum to bring it to an abrupt stop.

Surprisingly, we were able to save the majority of the cards
involved in a D.D. if we were fast enough. They were quite
rugged, despite being not too much thicker than mag tape, maybe a
bit thinner than a punch card. Most of the time, IIRC, we'd have
to open the back door of the cabinet to put the drum drive belt
back on the pulley.

Here's the address template for the cards showing which parts of
the notches to trim to hard code the card number:

http://members.aol.com/billturlok/ncr/cram.jpg

It may not be intuitively obvious that the deck of mylar cards
hung on this system of eight rods, each shaped in the shape of a
"D", with the flat side of the "D" horizontal and topmost.

The red legend on the template shows which 'corner' to snip (I
can't remember whether we had a special tool, or just used
scissors to make the cuts).

Each rod could rotate axially, continuing to supporting all the
cards except the one which had been programmatically called for,
allowing it to fall into the chute. As the 'corners' got worn
from use, sometimes more than one card might fall, leading to the
impassioned cry, "DOUBLE DROP!!!"

Here is the very 315 I'm talking about:

http://www.unoalumni.org/About_Us/Fl...e/92/index.asp


http://content.techweb.com/encyclope...m=CRAM&exact=1

http://www.presshere.com/html/pw8012.htm


Bill Turlock