This seriously trumps all those cassette-tape-as-art T-shirts you see these days on the young whippersnappers.
In my day, sonny, we had a whole room for the tape deck!
PS If you look closely at Dr. Evil’s lair in the first Austin Powers movie, you’ll notice that the tape drives on the left and right sides are different from each other. I guess there weren’t enough tape drives of the same model left in the universe to fill a movie set by the early nineties.
I’ve actually used these – and I’m not even thirty yet. Admittedly it was only a couple of times, to retrieve some data that had been stored for well over 25 years, but they still worked (and had been left set up in the mainframe warehouse, untouched for all of that time). They sound like a household vacuum cleaner, as it uses a vacuum to draw out the tape. The kerplukle-blipuckle noise they make sounds like something out of a sci-fi. And the automatic sliding glass door on the front was pretty cool. In short, gadget fans, these were everything you’d expect they’d be.
I remember them well. The early ones had a density of 800 bits per inch. I think they got to 3,200 before they went away. They wrote data in blocks with 1/2 inch between. Later models could go from 100 inches per second down to 0 and then start up again in that 1/2 inch.
This seriously trumps all those cassette-tape-as-art T-shirts you see these days on the young whippersnappers.
In my day, sonny, we had a whole room for the tape deck!
PS If you look closely at Dr. Evil’s lair in the first Austin Powers movie, you’ll notice that the tape drives on the left and right sides are different from each other. I guess there weren’t enough tape drives of the same model left in the universe to fill a movie set by the early nineties.
I’m going to have to take a closer look at the TF2 map 2fort, now. These look too familiar.
IBM Tape Drives (1965) (BSOD) & Big Blue
Maybe this is where MS got the idea for Blue Sreen of Death and IMB got Big Blue form LOL
I’ve actually used these – and I’m not even thirty yet. Admittedly it was only a couple of times, to retrieve some data that had been stored for well over 25 years, but they still worked (and had been left set up in the mainframe warehouse, untouched for all of that time). They sound like a household vacuum cleaner, as it uses a vacuum to draw out the tape. The kerplukle-blipuckle noise they make sounds like something out of a sci-fi. And the automatic sliding glass door on the front was pretty cool. In short, gadget fans, these were everything you’d expect they’d be.
Somebody oughta make a scale model of these with a USB external drive in it. Spinning reels would be teh awesome detail too.
I remember them well. The early ones had a density of 800 bits per inch. I think they got to 3,200 before they went away. They wrote data in blocks with 1/2 inch between. Later models could go from 100 inches per second down to 0 and then start up again in that 1/2 inch.