IBM photostore (was: Re: digital camera capabilities)

Roy J. Tellason wrote: [snip] One of these was in use at LBL as well, where it was sometimes called chipstore (an apparent reference to the individual pieces of film). Chips were organized into cells, cells into trays. When a particular chip was needed the appropriate tray was rotated into place, an arm selected the appropriate cell and it was sucked out of the tray and sent on Mr. Toad's Pneumatic Wild Ride to the reading station, where the cell was popped open and the film loaded into the reader. That was the theory, at least. Unfortunately it had a very bad habit of sometimes screwing up the last step; consequently there was frequently a broom nearby in the company of a small pile of chips. I recall that data density was quite high, reading speed was high but access times were long. Writing used some combination of electron beam and wet chemistry, so while the bit rate was respectable the throughput was -er- on the slow side. IIRC the primary use was to store census data. Co-located in the same room with the chipstore was a truly strange magnetic storage device from IBM that was referred to as MSS. It consisted of a carousel of rectangular magnetic sheets and a single reader-writer station; the carousel would rotate the correct sheet into the station and then the sheet would move up and down past a series of fixed heads. What made all of this truly strange is that these IBM peripherals hung off CDC channel controllers that interfaced them to 6000 series machines. CDC and IBM FEs would periodically get into pissing contests over who was responsible for various faults; recurring ones would end up with a piece of paper taped to the channel controller that would say something to the effect of "TP XYZ +X volts -> IBM problem, -Y volts -> CDC problem". -- Chris Kennedy chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97 PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97 "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."