> On Oct 20, 2017, at 3:54 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> I spent a lot of my early days threading CDC 60x and 65x tape drives.
> There, the supply reel, as you face the drive, is on your right side and
> takeup is on the left. It's easy to thread--I could thread up a drive
> in 15 seconds or so.
>
> But IBM and, it seems, much of the rest of the world swaps the reel
> positions, so that the tape unspools and is taken up on the *inside* of
> the facing reels.
>
> Why is this? The CDC positioning is simple and darned near foolproof.
> I realize with the rise of auto-threaders that the subject is moot, but
> I'm still curious.
It never occurred to me that it matters. The first drives I encountered were
IBM ones, on a 360/44. Then a TU10. Then CDC 607. The TU10 is a bit of a
hassle to load because of the reels one above the other; all the others seemed
fine.
The one thing that always struck me as utterly nuts was the fact that those IBM
tape drives had vacuum columns with the tape loaded oxide side out -- i.e.,
oxide rubbing against the side walls of the columns. Everyone else did it the
right way.
paul
