Moore's Law applied to tape …
A comic strip this morning represented a computer with 12 inch reel-to-reel tape drives. Such drives were my friend … in the early 1980s over 40 years ago.
In 1984 IBM introduced 3480 tapes drives, using cartridges about the size of a 8-track tape with much higher capacity than the older 12 inch reels. Also, you could queue an entire pile of scratch tapes to be written in the input stacker of one of the drives.
(Whereas in 1970 12" reel-to-reel drives held hundreds of megabytes per reel, the descendants of the various cartridge tape drives by leading vendors hold up to 40 TB.)
But who thinks of a computer when you look at an 8-track tape player?
IBM System/360 2400 Series Tape Drives
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| IBM System/370 3480 Series Tape Drives |
