3480 is interesting technically because it was one of the first drives to use magneto-restrictive read heads, which are much more sensitive than inductive. The 18 track head stack will work on a conventional 1/2" tape transport, as will the 36 track heads from a 3490.
This is what is in the modified STC 9914V drives shown in this paper use: http://storageconference.us/2008/presentations/3.Wednesday/5.Bordynuik.pdf About ten years ago, I bought a dozen 3480's in Chicago, and took them up to my parents farm in Wisconsin and stripped them down for the head stacks. 7340 Hypertape was developed for the Stretch project, and were mainly used by NSA. On 7/17/16 9:23 AM, Jason T wrote: > A very nice IBM 3480 brochure ended up in my hands yesterday and I had > to bump it to the top of the scan queue: > > https://archive.org/details/IBM3480MagneticTapeSubsystemBrochure > > Lots of nice shots of IBM data center tape equipment as well as a cool > "history of tape at IBM" set of pages. I've never heard of 7340 > Hypertape. > > -j >
