From: "William Donzelli" <aw288_at_osfn.org>
Subject: 7 track tape terminal
> I have an extra Mohawk Data Services 7 track (!) tape terminal
> available. Basically, it is a tape drive with a keyboard - oh the weird
> stuff they used to do back then!
Back in 69-70, I was an operator in a shop where they used Mohawk data entry
systems for (mainly) salary-related work. The model they used, only had 1
reel. The "used" part of the tape was just falling down into a drawer. The
systems worked like shit (sorry to say so), as we had read errors on just
about every tape we attempted to read. We read them on 9-track IBM drives.
One day, IIRC, we started to read them (about 20 tapes or so), at 1600. We
were supposed to be finished at 5-ish, but had to sweat through countless
errors, cleaning cycles, etc. until we sort-of finished at 2100. Some tapes
just couldnt be read, on any of the 5 drives we tried.
Nico
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Received on Sun May 09 2004 - 00:30:00 BST