STC drives were the reliable ones. Ever use Potter drives in the late 1970s or in the 1980s?
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@listserv.ua.edu> on behalf of Edward Gould <edgould1...@comcast.net> Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2018 9:03 PM To: IBM-MAIN@listserv.ua.edu Subject: Re: CLIP? > On May 24, 2018, at 2:17 PM, Dan D <zos.j...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Back in the 70's & 80's we had a program to "CLIP" a DASD volume to simply > change the label (before ICKDSF was available) > I am stretching my memory but, I believe the precursor to ICKDSF was IEHDASDR > (or something close). > > When a tape lead was crunched around the capstan we would simply splice in a > NEW lead. As soon as that tape had completed being used for the current job > we quickly took it to support to be duplicated to a new tape with a > NON-spliced lead. > The spliced tape had the temporary lead cut off, a new reflector tape was > added to the appropriate location and the volume was re-initialized. An > exciting time for the "library support" people. Our “tape Librarians” we not our first class people. The only thing they did was to throw the tape away (forget about erasing it first) And goto a new box of tapes and set up the initializations. I don’t even recall if they told TMS. We tried to put a tape degausser in the budget but it was never approved. Somehow an auditor got involved and suddenly a tape degauser showed up. I might be a cynic but I don’t think they ever used it. 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. Ed ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
