Data Cell - Tape, Card or Disk? I'm pretty sure the developers thought of the media of the IBM 2321 as tape rather than cards, although the strips (of tape) were addressed as disk drives (DASD) not tape. It was a mechanical marvel that IMO then (late 60s) only IBM could have successfully built and marketed such a beast. Those interested might want to read the oral history on this machine at https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/05/102657934- 05-01-acc.pdf My favorite failure was when they found strips back in the bins but up-side down and backwards - they fixed than and many other problems too and in the end I'm told it was a rather successful product.
NCR CRAM (Card Random Access Memory) truly considered magnetic cards as the media, see https://www.computerhistory.org/brochures/m-p/national-cash-register-company -ncr/ Tom -----Original Message----- From: Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> Sent: Friday, April 12, 2024 6:54 AM To: cctalk@classiccmp.org Subject: [cctalk] Re: IBM 360 > On Apr 12, 2024, at 9:48 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > On Fri, 12 Apr 2024 at 13:31, Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> wrote: > >> Yes. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2321_Data_Cell . By the standards of the time it was an unusually high capacity storage device, way faster than a room full of tapes and much larger than the 2311 disk drive. > > Fascinating. Thank you. It sounds truly awful. A device that > effectively tries to push strips of tape into receptacles? I suppose. Or magnetic cards. There were other devices that used magnetic cards, like the Olivetti Programma -- world's first programmable calculator. For that matter, magnetic cards are still around, they are called credit cards. :-) paul
