Edward Gould wrote:
Our big boss was trying to show the board how he tried to save money. They sort of forced him into getting STC (now STK) tape drives. All of a sudden some of our jobs were getting S237 (block count did not match trailers), STC said we had bum tapes, we went through all sort of shenanigans to prove they weren’t. I had to write a program that counted blocks and compare it the tapes count. The entire mess ended up with STC getting kicked out and IBM drives were brought back in. Of course never a S237 with a IBM drive. Our tape library while not super large it was large and finally management finally figured it out in order to get good people you had to hire/pay for them.
I swear we went through the same thing! At my first job in the mid 80s, the shop had STC drives. We had to keep a log of tapes with "errors". And when we had a drive that took a machine check error on any tape, we had to dismount the tape and run it through a "cleaner". At the same time, we had to wipe down the interior of the drive with some awful cleaning chemical. All drives were cleaned before batch started too. We regularly took 2-3 drives out of service per night for the CE to "review" in the morning. Tapes were also held for "research". Some were claimed to have "gunk" on them from the drives or our "bad/cheap" tapes. Some tapes we would find right back in service the next day. Others we found the drives were putting an a crease in them somehow. Supposedly the CE was swapping controller cards and other parts too. After a couple of years, I got out of operations and into programming. I don't think they ever resolved it. The company was eventually bought by another company that was strictly IBM. I'll bet the STC drives ended up in a junk pile somewhere.
Alan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
