Quothe Brian Mahoney, from writings of Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 07:19:25AM -0400: Look at the size of those tape reels! I'll bet the tape is fairly low density, as magtape goes. Looks more like some kind of Chevy... perhaps he's selling the tape drive so that he can upgrade from owning Chevys to Fords. ;-) (ducking) -- Copyright (C) 2003 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals: All Rights Reserved | My VAX | an unnatural belief that we're above Nature & www.rddavis.org | runs VMS & | her other creatures, using dogma to justify such 410-744-4900 | doesn't crash!| beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.

That is not a computer tape drive, but an instrumentation tape drive for recording analog data. These were quite common in the 60s and 70s, and were used to record telemetry from rockets, aircraft, ships, cars, or really any lab experiment that generated huge amounts of real time data. Most have large reals like this - you never wanted the tape to run out just as the experiment started to get interesting! William Donzelli aw288(a)osfn.org

Tom> On Tue, 20 Apr 2004, Nico de Jong wrote: Tom> Or some wacky custom analog data recorder, hence the large Tom> reels, but there's a lot of BNCs back there. Reasonable enough; I remember seeing datasheets for instrumentation recorder heads with 15 channels and perhaps twice that. paul