Johnson, Tracy wrote:

> P.S.S.  Anyone remember using a tape splicing kit?

For analog audio, yes.  For digital, no; but that would be a neat trick :-)

Very early in my career, I was a 3rd-shift operator at a service bureau, and handled enough 9-track tapes to last a hundred lifetimes.  You loaded client files from tape, ran whatever jobs, and dumped their files back to a new tape.

Expired tapes went into the scratch tape pool.  After "x" number of cycles through manual loading by operators in a hurry <grin> the leaders would start to get ragged.  You could always snip off the crumpled bits and leave a clean end, but eventually there wasn't enough leader before the BOT marker for it to load.

So yes, it was one of the weekly duties of the 3rd-shift operator to take tapes with > x cycles through the library, strip off 20-30 feet or so, and put on a new BOT.

But I haven't seen a tape marker dispenser in a *LONG* time :-)

Jeff

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