On Fri, 13 Oct 2017 20:46:36 -0400, Tony Harminc ([email protected]) wrote about "Re: ShopZ order response" (in <caarmm9s8ygkewkfedrrdtaz+81e28_ej2uolygc24c0jv2b...@mail.gmail.com>):
> On 13 October 2017 at 18:47, Phil Smith III <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Anyone know if Sterling Forest still has 3420s? Last time I was there >> (2004?) they did, and even a 7-track drive IIRC. > > Also in 2004 I was surprised to see a short string of 3420 drives, all > powered up and lights on, at one of our UK banking customers. I asked, > and it seems they were used only for data exchange. A nightly courier > would arrive from each of the other big banks with tapes, and be > dispatched with the ones from this bank. I had a vision, perhaps not > inaccurate, of each bank having such a dusty set of drives used only > for the same purpose. > > Maybe someone at a UK bank can tell us if that scheme survives today... I can't vouch for today, but the use of 9-track, reel-to-reel tapes was the standard back in the late 1990's. >From 1996 to 1999 I was working at Lloyd's Bank in London. I was working in a section called Autoclearings and our batch jobs wrote and read these tapes. The Bank of England ran a clearing house through which all financial transfers were made between clearing banks. The concrete bunker was in Uxbridge. All the clearing banks would write their pending transactions to 9-track tape (with ANSI labels and RECFM=DB ASCII records). These tapes would then be put into an armoured car and sent off to Uxbridge. Tapes containing completed transactions would be sent back to the banks so they could reconcile their accounts. In 1998 the Bank of England announced that they had a new system called High Speed Transfer (HST). This consisted of custom terminals with hardware cryptography connected to leased lines ... that went to Uxbridge. The data transmissions were made up of ANSI format HDR1 and HDR2 records, a stream of ASCII data records in RECFM=DB format, followed by ANSI format TLR1 and TLR2 records. This was not warmly received by the clearing banks as state-of-the-art technology. I find it a little surprising that reel-to-reel tape was still being used in 2004 but, given that the HST alternative was really no better, I guess we should not be really surprised. -- Regards, Dave [RLU #314465] *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* [email protected] (David W Noon) *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
