Way later than the 1950's, a tape operator called me to watch a Storage
Tek reel drive do something strange: He mounted a scratch tape and the
job took off spinning the reels so fast that soon the metal capstan got
hot enough to melt the tape, basically destroying both tape and capstan.
Then he pointed to the drive just to the left that had failed the same
way a few minutes earlier.
Since the tape was moving so fast with no apparent i/o breaks, I thought
I could reproduce the error by running a big IEBGENER with a large
blocksize and BUFNO=255. So I ran that, and sure enough ruined yet
another capstan! I think they were about $900 each, but at least we
found the cause.
Edward Gould wrote:
Behold the Fascinating Nightmare of Debugging a Computer from the 1950s
It takes a lot more than some typing.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21586/debugging-1959-vacuum-tape-drive/?mag=pop&list=nl_pnl_news&src=nl&date=063016 <http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a21586/debugging-1959-vacuum-tape-drive/?mag=pop&list=nl_pnl_news&src=nl&date=063016>
Sure brings back some memories that today's generation will never be able to
relate !
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