On 02/04/2016 07:48 PM, Mike Loewen wrote:
I'm trying to identify a system which appeared in "The
Killer Elite" (1975), with a room full of tape drives and
a couple of terminals:
http://q7.neurotica.com/killer-1.png
http://q7.neurotica.com/killer-2.png
http://q7.neurotica.com/killer-6.png
http://q7.neurotica.com/killer-9.png
The drives appear to be IBM 3420s, but with an
additional box on top, labeled "SMS". The system itself
doesn't appear in any of the shots. Some sort of IBM 370,
perhaps?
I'm thinking they might be 2420's. They have a "9" label on
the head cover. This is to distinguish 9-track from 7-track
drives, I don't think they put those labels on 3420 drives.
The drive addresses are 5xx, meaning they are attached to
channel 5 on the CPU. That is not impossible on a 360, but
few 360's could handle that many channels. The cluster of
3270's also suggests a 370 system, although they certainly
could be used on 360's.
The SMS boxes displayed the volume label of the tape to
mount. Mounting the wrong tape was a BIG problem in large
systems, so a number of vendors came up with these sorts of
schemes to try to reduce those errors.
Jon
