Strange magtape anecdote

On 10/26/2020 10:50 PM, nico de jong via cctalk wrote: the 3420 drives and I suspect their predecessors which were more common on the 360s used one light bulb to run the light from one bulb all over the drive. The 3420's we had had a big box of spaghetti tubing which were the light pipes to service our ?drives.? I had the box somewhere when we shut down.? The 3420s and 3803 went one way, the most of the service spares were abandoned. There were a lot of weird problems with light sensors on those drives.? We had some on our 360/50 at UMR as well, but the 2314 disk drives were more entertaining with hydraulic failures. thanks Jim PS: when googling ran across this site using an interesting graphic with interesting peripherals. https://serverpartswarehouse.com/100-oem-ibm-9348-001-magnetic-tape-unit/ PPS:? 2420 drive reference page for that half inch drive. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_2420.html