Oh, the memories!!!

As the one and only operator, early in my career, I remember receiving a
new shipment of tapes from a vendor.  I decided to use them that night
on our full backup; it generally took 9 tapes.  After labeling the tapes
I mounted the first one on the 7933e (I think) drive and began the
backup.  After waiting for a few minutes I saw the reel start to spin so
I got up to go get a soda or something.
As I stood up I notice the reel begin to rewind, then I saw the job log
off???  I reviewed the $stdlist and discovered the backup had aborted
because of a tape error.  I went over to the tape drive and to my horror
I noticed the tape head was covered in what looked like black soot. HP
was contacted and they dispatched an engineer to fix the problem.  Once
on site he looked at the drive head and said the drive head was
destroyed by the oxide from the tape.  Since it wasn't covered under
maintenance we were charged time and material.
Turns out the tape manufacturer forgot 1 step in creating the tapes.
They forgot to add the mylar coating over the oxide material.  The
scraper on the drive head scraped the oxide off; giving the tape head
that sooty look.
The tape manufacturer was contacted, they took back all the tape and
sent new ones and they also paid us for the maintenance charge from HP.

Oh the memories!!!! 

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Jeff Kell
Sent: Friday, June 02, 2006 8:31 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] Converting A 7980S to a 7980A for a Classic

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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