27 Jan
2023
27 Jan
'23
10:10 p.m.
On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 02:54:19PM +0000, Ron Natalie wrote:
It included traditional 6250 9 track tapes and the
then-popular exabyte 8mm (which was atrociously short lived).
Ah, 8mm Exabyte, how I despise thee.
When I left Sun for SGI, Ken Okin graciously let me take my Sun 4/470,
that had 768MB of ram (crazy big for the time, I had that because I fixed
the VM system for big memory machines). It also had an 8mm Exabyte and
a bunch of goodies on tape.
Wheeling that machine from my VW van into building 9 at SGI was enough
jiggling that *none* of my tapes were readable.
I've never seen a more fragile system than those exabyte. By comparison,
the old SCSI QIC 150s, while small, were industructible, I think you
could have used the tapes as hammers and they'd still read. Same thing
for 9 track.