I seem to remember that VM/370 would check the label on the tape
media and kick it if it didn't match. But you know they say that
the first thing to go is, umm, uh, Give me a minute....
Steve Thompson
On 11/7/2025 9:52 AM, Phil Smith III wrote:
Tripped across this, which sorta makes me sad:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/1bsy5sf/what_is_this_machine_called_and_what_are_the/
The 3420 reminds me: back at UofW, they had a system that would create a
4-character hash (I assume) from the tape number. So when you asked for tape
1234, the operator would pull it and when they responded to the mount request,
they had to enter that 4-character value. If they'd accidentally pulled 1235
instead, there would be a mismatch and it would tell them to try again.
Was something like this common? This was on VM/SP, and I'm sure it wasn't
standard there, as when I left and went to my first vendor I never saw it
again. Seemed simple yet clever.
ObAnecdote: UofW built the Math building with a "pit"--the data center--in the
middle, two stories tall, with glass-walled rooms around it on the second level. One of
those rooms was a public terminal room, and if working there meant that when you needed a
tape, you could put in the mount request and watch the operator ignore it. Srsly: there
were good operators and bad ones, and if one of the bad ones was on, you'd see him
(always him, in those days!) look up, check what had made the console beep, and go back
to reading. Still irritates me, 45 years later.
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Regards,
Steve Thompson
MaGA:
Make Mainframes Great Again: They use radiators not flowing water.
They also can do more work with a watt of power than server farm servers.
They are designed for parallel multi-tasking from the factory.
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