28 Apr
2018
28 Apr
'18
12:37 a.m.
On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 2:16 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
On 4/27/18, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
wrote:
Accept that it will like tape in the head contacted the media.
Question for Debbie S --- my memory is you folks had one up the hill at
LBL. I think that's where I saw it in action.
ᐧ
On Wed, 25 Apr 2018, Paul Winalski wrote:
That's the one. I'd always heard "noodle picker", though. From the
outside it looked like a drum in the shape of a multi-sided polygon.
Each bin held a number of wide pieces of multitrack magnetic tape. To
seek to your data, the drum rotated under a head that pulled the
appropriate tape out of the bin and wrapped it on rotating drum. From
there reading and writing was much like any other drum device. It's
as if someone asked Rube Goldberg to design a disk drive. Bin number was zero except on the IBM 2321 data
cell drive. CKD drives
supported a variable number of records on each track, hence the term
"record" rather than "sector".
Would that have been the infamous chicken-plucker?[*] Wherein if things
went OK, then they were OK, but if things went wrong...