17 Dec
2010
17 Dec
'10
12:26 p.m.
On Friday, December 17, 2010 06:13:53 am Ralf Mardorf did opine:
On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 05:57 -0500, gene heskett
wrote:
Of course I do, that pic on my front page is 6 years old now. ;-)
On Friday, December 17, 2010 05:52:17 am Ralf
Mardorf did opine:
I corrected myself, it's just because you're looking younger on your
photos ;). On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 05:30 -0500, gene heskett
wrote:
I'll have to call you on that one, Ralf. It was some of your folks
that invented the wire recorder in about '38 or '39, and the coated
paper tape was sometime in the later 40's. I was born in '34. On Friday, December 17, 2010 05:15:04 am Philipp
�berbacher did
opine: [...]
> I guess it really depends on what you try to achieve. Afaik the
> average life-span of a HD is puny 2 years.
Some maybe. I have a 1Gb seacrate hawk I use on a TRS-80 Color
Computer that is a good 15 years old, and I hooked up an old
Quantum P40S beside it the other day that must be close to 18
years old. No bad sectors were found when I did a logical verify
of the surface.
Ok, my 40MB SCSI Seagate for the Atari is ok for more than 20 years,
heavy usage, several startups a day. Sometimes I need to start it 2
or 3 times, but than it's ok.
> From what I heard the magnetic tapes
> used by for example ESA a long time ago have a life-span of 80
> years. If 'store it good and forget' is what you're after then
> tape seems like a good idea.
That seems to be a recipe for disaster. Will there be a working
tape drive to read those old tapes in even 40 years?
For analog tapes Dirk Brauner had Telefunken machines that are as
old as you are and they were better than a lot of modern machines
;). Of cause, I guess the Telefunk - or was it AEG? -
machines
were without tubes. The magnetic tape head had visible slots.
The first Telefunken wire, or tape machines I saw, were definitely tubes.
And older types at that, 8 pin octal based stuff. Yes folks, I have been
chasing electrons for a living for a long time. And TBT, my first
experience with a wire machine was enough to break me of any further
interest. No amount of level winding contraptions could stop the
backlashes & broken wire. Not to mention the head wear rate was very high.
At least we could get 200-400 hours out of the first tape heads if we fed
then plastic tape. Wire, maybe 50 hours as the wire sawed them deeply in
just a few hours.
Because the tapes were stored spooled to the end,
there even was no
audible crosstalk at the beginning of the recordings.
Print through was a real problem in the early years.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Experiments must be reproducible; they should all fail in the same way.