Re: Re: Interesting idea

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 9:25 PM, jeffsavit <[email protected]> wrote:
> --- In [email protected], "idc3009i" <idc3009i@...> wrote:
>
>> The 3330s were the removable packs which the MSS emulated.  They actually worked off of a wide (5 or 6 inches) magnetic tape on a single reel.  This was presented to the system as a 3330V device type.  When accessed, the robot arm loaded the tape cartridge from its cell inside the unit to a reader and staged it to 3350 from where it was accessed.  De-staging was the reverse of the process.  Lovely to watch it in action... there was even a window in the side!
>
>
> For sins in a prior life I had to support one of these when I worked for an NJ insurance company.  It was quite a Rube Goldberg contraption, but not as bad as the infamous data cells.
>
> There was an AUDITMSS command you could use to verify if a given honeycomb cell was occupied or empty consistent with what the Mass Storage Volume Inventory table said it should be (oh dear, how ancient jargons are still lodged in memory).  You would specify the X, Y and Z coordinates of the cell you wanted to check. A fun trick was to make it tap the window and startle bystanders.
>
> I still have a bunch of the tape cartridges - they make excellent paperweights, and nobody knows what the heck they are. :-)
> ------------------------------------

Hello!
Makes sense.
Last year I was at a seminar that your company threw on the subject of
server sprawl and how to avoid it. They showed some excellent photos
of their labs. One of them contained a representative of System Z, the
presenter commented that the rep was there, of course he didn't
actually come out and say why. I then asked in an a carefully phrased
way about the participation in the division that supports external
mass storage arrays. And since the last time I checked, that division
does work with System Z, it made sense that the fellow was there.

Everyone there found my way phrasing an interesting one. The presenter
thought, and this is when the seminar ended, that I was a plant. Since
I wasn't a spiderplant, I did indeed confirm who I was. He just stared
at me as if I was backed up by the crowd from those movies.
-----
Gregg C Levine [email protected]
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."