Back at the start of the 1970s we had some pretty bad experiences with tapes sent through the mail getting erased because they were put on the floor of guard's vans on electric trains. The motors in the bogies underneath did the rest. Some were so completely erased that they just spun through and dropped off the end.
We started transmitting Barclaycard input data between two data centres - one in Northampton and one near Manchester - in 1973. The input came off a 2415 unit attached to a 360/25 and the output was stored on a 3330 attached to a /165. The annual rental for the leased line was about the same as an operator's salary. The modem was 2400 baud and about as big as a tower PC. It had a dial and meter on the front, and the line had to be "balanced" every day before the transfer was started. The transfer took over an hour and was usually successful. Like all bank files, there were internal hash check trailers so we knew no data had gone missing. One day it coughed. We reran it, then brought all the files together to find out what had happened. The only explanation was that one of our 2415s had dropped a bit while recording the input tape. One of the very few occasions in a long mainframe career when I can honestly say the equipment failed without alerting us to the fact. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
