17 Feb
2007
17 Feb
'07
10:33 a.m.
Richard wrote...
OK, I'm just not familiar with 9-track drives in
the sense of who
manufactures the guts that everyone uses.
The 9-tracks I know of that were very
commonly oem'd was Kennedy, Cipher,
Wangtek, and M4 Data.
So were these used on PDP-11s? IBM machines? Control
Data?
Kennedy and Cipher are probably the most common - I've certainly seen them
on DEC machines. As to IBM & Control Data, that's not my area so I don't
know. IBM was fond of making their own stuff from scratch. HP (in the period
I'm familiar with) bought bits from folks then put them together themselves.
You say pretty much everything, but I've never
heard of Kennedy drives
before. Is that because everyone else bought them from Kennedy and
then OEMed them with their own label on them?
Kennedy and Cipher are probably the
two biggest tape drives as to volume of
units made. They were uniquitous. While they were OEM'd under other labels,
they were still usually called Kennedy & Cipher units in the circles I'm
familiar with.
Jay