Hah, all good points. As for "unstructured, informal use of tapes": back when tapes were still The Way, I'd go to customer sites occasionally to debug some oddball problem. I had a 3480 cartridge I'd come across with a red shell, which I'd take with because it was always easier to tell operations "Please retrieve that RED tape you mounted..."
Until the day they put it in an STK silo. Which used a red laser to detect tapes--and insisted the slot was empty when they asked it to retrieve it. They wound up powering the silo down (after much discussion and permission-ing) and physically walking in to retrieve it. After that, I carried the red AND a standard black cartridge, and would check whether they had a silo... -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2025 11:23 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Ancient history: 3420s Like many of us, I remember 729s, 7330s, 3420s, 3490s, etc. I remember the well-structured use of the tapes as related to important production jobs. The new "robots" (perhaps with "virtual tapes") can do this well - although there might be a learning process involved when something goes wrong. However, I also remember the unstructured, informal use of tapes. They could sometimes be very handy when stuck in a drawer or carried to a friend's installation or used for an unplanned "panic" recovery involving data/programs many months old. It can be a little odd how some "history" repeats itself. A considerable number of System Z ISVs use an emulated System Z for development of their ISV products. These emulators provide emulated tape drives, where the "tape" is a linux file on the emulated base PC. There are many ways to keep backups of emulated disk datasets or emulated tapes. One way is to use a memory stick and move/copy the emulated tapes to the memory stick, and store it in a drawer somewhere. Why does this process sometimes remind me of the odd usefulness of old-fashioned tapes? Bill Ogden ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
