RE: Floppy drives on ancient AS/400's

We had, as I recall, a pair of the vertical reel-to-reels on our early AS400. It had the magic sliding door.

I remember we later had the pizza oven one too.

And, I have fond(?) memories of IPL'ing S/38's from the 8" diskette cartridges for upgrades.


-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2021 10:53 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; James H. H. Lampert <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Floppy drives on ancient AS/400's

I believe there was one vertical column tape drive supported on the
earliest machines. Most though were rack mounted about 5U or available
as table top with a cover.

The most common early unit was 1600 and 3200 BPI (the later not a
standard density) It had a smoked color plastic door that you really
couldn't see through. The control panel was terrible and it was so
unreliable it was referred to as the '9347 piece of shit.' IBM replaced
the planar board in ours half a dozen times. It was not an IBM
manufactured drive. The 9348 replace it and it did 1600 and 6250 BPI.
(It could not read the 3200 BPI tapes) It was fabulously more reliable
and the same size as the older unit. Tapes in these were slid into the
front like a pizza.



On 5/21/2021 1:37 PM, James H. H. Lampert wrote:

On 5/21/21 10:26 AM, Steinmetz, Paul via MIDRANGE-L wrote:

In the late 80's our S/38 had the below.

8" floppy     - Used for system maintenance.

Hmm. As it happens, the 4341 I mentioned in another thread had 8" floppy
drives buried inside at least one, and possibly several, of the cabinets.

BTW, are there any pictures of what a 1/2" reel tape drive even *looks
like* on an AS/400? Does it look like your typical mainframe tape drive,
vacuum columns and all? (I think the only place I can recall seeing tape
drives of that sort in operation, in person, is at the Computer History
Museum, in Mountain View, on their restored IBM 1401 [and maybe also
their restored PDP-1, although I think *that* uses a *punched paper
tape* drive]).

--
JHHL