24 Feb
2000
24 Feb
'00
3:44 a.m.
Hi all
I just found 3 packages of Masstor data cartridges. They are cylindrical
about 2 1/2 inches in diameter, about 4 inches long and look to be covered
with some sort of oxide surface. They are hollow and have a kind of snap in
connector on one end. I have examined the Web and the only references I
find are for large mass storage devices for supercomputer and particle
accelerator labs. I seem to remember, from some movie, some sort of robot
arm storage device that picked cylindrical cartridges out of a honeycomb
structure and inserted them in to a reader/writer. Very large storage,
about 360 GB, late 80's early 90's time frame.
Any information would be approciated
Mike
mmcfadden(a)cmh.edu
24 Feb
24 Feb
7:11 a.m.
On Thu, Feb 24, 2000 at 08:44:23AM -0600, McFadden, Mike wrote:
I seem to remember, from some movie, some sort of
robot
arm storage device that picked cylindrical cartridges out of a honeycomb
structure and inserted them in to a reader/writer. Very large storage,
about 360 GB, late 80's early 90's time frame.
Any information would be approciated
I can't shed any light except to say that I've heard the same thing.
The person who told me about them (and yes this would have been mid/late
80s) had worked for a large IBM mainframe installation (Oklahoma dept. of
transportation IIRC, I can't believe there's so much computing to do for
that but who knows, he said they had a bunch of 3081s), and he specifically
mentioned the robotic picker. I *think* he said the actual storage medium
was some kind of filament contained inside the can but I could be wrong.
John Wilson
D Bit
2:55 p.m.
Ahh yes, the waay cool IBM MSS system. Used a robotic arm to pull a
cylinder that was then dumped into a reader and transferred _in bulk_ to an
attached 3380 disk drive that then was treated like available DASD storage.
Extremely cool, very big, and a kick to watch!
--Chuck
At 08:44 AM 2/24/00 -0600, you wrote:
Hi all
I just found 3 packages of Masstor data cartridges. They are cylindrical
about 2 1/2 inches in diameter, about 4 inches long and look to be covered
with some sort of oxide surface. They are hollow and have a kind of snap in
connector on one end. I have examined the Web and the only references I
find are for large mass storage devices for supercomputer and particle
accelerator labs. I seem to remember, from some movie, some sort of robot
arm storage device that picked cylindrical cartridges out of a honeycomb
structure and inserted them in to a reader/writer. Very large storage,
about 360 GB, late 80's early 90's time frame.
Any information would be approciated
Mike
mmcfadden(a)cmh.edu
3:39 p.m.
Chuck McManis wrote:
Ahh yes, the waay cool IBM MSS system. Used a robotic arm to pull a
cylinder that was then dumped into a reader and transferred _in bulk_ to an
attached 3380 disk drive that then was treated like available DASD storage.
Extremely cool, very big, and a kick to watch!
Did this use the same sort of technology as the '70s MSS? LBL had
one attached via homespun hardware to a CDC channel controller that
was in turn attached to a 6600. It was an amazing machine, used a
robotic arm to select a rectangular container which it sucked up
and shot through a Rube Goldbergesque collection of tubes to
a reading station. It used rectangular pieces of film which were
read optically.
Standard equipment for operation of this thing was a broom, since
it had an unhappy habit of puking the film bits all over the floor
on a regular basis. It was eventually replaced by a robotic
tape library (which promptly caught fire).
--
Chris Kennedy
chris(a)mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
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chris＠mainecoon.com -
cmcmanis＠mcmanis.com -
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wilson＠dbit.dbit.com