I only saw one of these- back in the early 1980,s I got to tour
the main processing facility for TWA Airlines. They had a HUGE
data center in Kansas City, with thousands of IBM mainframes.
.
Anyway... recording media (yea, thats the topic)
.
TWA had an IBM secondary tape storage that was really weird/cool.
It was an 80-foot free-standing wall, built with a honeycomb-like
pattern of holes in it- about 12cm in diameter. inside each of
these holes, was a really WIDE storage tape, about 15cm wide.
There were THOUSANDS of these, in the wall, and each one looked
like a dark roll of toilette paper! In the middle of the wall,
there were eight tape drives, and a set of robot arms would roll
up and down tracks on the wall, to retrieve tapes, and put them
in the drives, as requested. - - Really impressive for the time. |
