OK then

There you go.~

I had a friend who worked for a computer company by the name of Geodigit ... circa 1969 and I joined him at work on a few occasions. His job -primarily- was to babysit the operations at night, change tape reels and do some minor problem solving if/when code wasn't entered correctly etc.

It was a lonely boring job ... being mostly by himself in an ice-cold room filled with tape machines and a "memory bank" which sat in an area all by itself, sort of cordoned off, blinking lights in a fascinating array of random orders. He said to me, "it's really neat to watch; it looks like it's really THINKING!"

I don't remember whether it had any kind of spinning platter to act as a hard drive but the tapes on the machines were really going like berserkers ... steadily. They'd fly backwards and forwards without hesitation ... a feat impossible with directly linked reels-to-capstan ... but enabled through vacuum chamber movement buffers. (The tape feed from the reels could be well behind and quite different from the actual movement of tape through the capstan ... with the "slack" being provided in the vacuum chambers).



I almost drooled when I saw them, thinking how wonderful it would be to have something like that for audio recording. Of course, one of the problems with audio tapes always was ... the TIME it took to seek and find particular music numbers. The faster the winding speed, the greater the risk of jerking and stretching the tape.

-Vince