What's magtape good for anyway?

[Allison J Parent]

<Was dectape an attempt to remedy some of these problems?  My 
<hazy recollection was that you could treat dectape in some ways as if 
<it were a disk.

Dectape was an attempt to achive moderate amount of storage at low cost 
with good reliability.  It's stop, turnaround time was poor but the cost 
was very low.  It was preceeded by linktape which was very much similar.

<How much data can magtape hold?  If magtape was a portable media, 

varies with the size of the reel and the density it was recorded at.

<does that mean that the manufacturers agreed on the width of 
<the tape, the density of recording, the method of recording bits, 
<etc.?

To a point.  

<I have an old 9 track tape from a computer course I took in 1980.  
<For sentimental reasons I'd love to get a copy of its contents.  Is 
<this possible do you think?

Highly likely if you can find someone with a drive.

<Is 'merge sort' an example of an application that required three tape 
<drives?

Thats a typical one.  Sometimes 4 drives were used plus maybe a disk
system.  Two for source material, one for intermediate results, one or
more for programs and the last for final results.  Some machines were
very limited in the local memory they had so programs often were broken 
into small modules and loaded (chained) as needed on the fly.  Imagine
processing 500k of data in a 16k memory where a portion was also used 
for program code.

Allison


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