Mystery system

[William Donzelli]

Some models of 3420s were 7 track.

--
Will



On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 9:56 PM, Jon Elson <elson at pico-systems.com> wrote:
> On 02/04/2016 07:48 PM, Mike Loewen wrote:
>>
>>
>>    I'm trying to identify a system which appeared in "The Killer Elite"
>> (1975), with a room full of tape drives and a couple of terminals:
>>
>> http://q7.neurotica.com/killer-1.png
>> http://q7.neurotica.com/killer-2.png
>> http://q7.neurotica.com/killer-6.png
>> http://q7.neurotica.com/killer-9.png
>>
>>    The drives appear to be IBM 3420s, but with an additional box on top,
>> labeled "SMS".  The system itself doesn't appear in any of the shots. Some
>> sort of IBM 370, perhaps?
>>
> I'm thinking they might be 2420's.  They have a "9" label on the head cover.
> This is to distinguish 9-track from 7-track drives, I don't think they put
> those labels on 3420 drives.
>
> The drive addresses are 5xx, meaning they are attached to channel 5 on the
> CPU.  That is not impossible on a 360, but few 360's could handle that many
> channels.  The cluster of 3270's also suggests a 370 system, although they
> certainly could be used on 360's.
>
> The SMS boxes displayed the volume label of the tape to mount. Mounting the
> wrong tape was a BIG problem in large systems, so a number of vendors came
> up with these sorts of schemes to try to reduce those errors.
>
> Jon