Discussion of large systems

1 Nov 2006

...
        Does anyone have enough tape drives that they can
do the
     multi-drive merge/sort tape algorithms described in Knuth's
     Art of Computer Programming? 
    How many would that be?  
 Assuming it's the same as the one talked about on here:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_sort

 That's 4 drives.  I could easily do that on DLT or 3480 media. :) 
I've got this insane idea to try to implement said algorithm on an HP71B 
calculator using HP82161 tape drives. I've got 4 or 5 of the latter 
hanging around here.

I'd ignore the fact that the 71B normally creates a filesystem on said 
tapes, I'd just treat them as streams of blocks (and send the necessary 
HPIL DDT and DDL commands to access them). 

Time to get out tAoCP and have a look...

-tony

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Discussion of large systems