Oh, yeah, an old-time IBM CE who works for me, calls the 2321 "The Noodle
Snatcher"
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/datacell.html
http://www.science.uva.nl/museum/remarkable.html
http://members.optusnet.com.au/intaretro/2321DCD.htm
http://www.civeng.carleton.ca/ECL/re****ts/ECL186/ecl186a.htm
The 3850 Mass Storage Subsystem, I believe, replaced the 2321 and worked
much better.
We had one early in my career.
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/mss.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3850.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3850b.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3850
http://www.erinat.com/DSMuseum/1970s/1973IBM3850RWHead/index.html
"Chuck Stevens" <charles.stevens@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:e3e142$njn$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> The US Veterans Administration Data Processing Center in Austin, Texas
had
> *at least* three -- maybe at one point five -- of these beasts (one on a
> 360/40, two on a 360/65, maybe two more at one point on a 360/50)..
>
> I was an operator on those systems at the time -- late 1960's.
>
> Although speed was a big problem with the (as I recall) 2321 Data Cell
> Drive, a bigger problem was reliability. They had a nasty tendency to
> "crunch" strips, and when that happened, the strip had to be recreated
> from backup. This was virtually a daily occurrence in our shop. I
think
> we had a fully-2321-trained IBM engineers on site for two of the three
> ****fts, and another on call for the third ****ft, seven days a week.
>
> The first heavy production jobs -- I can't remember whether it was
> logistics & supply or VA ****tfolio loans -- took something like ten
hours
> for the daily processing on a 360/65, if it ran successfully. It didn't
> usually do so, and after a month of trying we were a month behind. At
> that point, each 400mb 2321 was replaced by a pair of "pizza-oven"
2314's
> with about the same 400MB capacity, and much greater speed and
> reliability. Daily processing dropped to three hours or less, and
> restorations from backup were almost unheard of.
>
> Part of the difficulty, I think, was that they used the devices for ISAM
> files with the indices in three of the ten bins and the data in the
other
> seven, so every record access required a "double pick", one on each side
> of the array of strips. This was an application design issue; the
device
> works fine for "online inquiry", but not as a batch DASD device.
>
> I think the Texas Department of Public Safety also had one or more of
> these; from what I heard at the time their (occasional online inquiry)
> application was better suited to the device than the VA's were.
>
> -Chuck Stevens
>
>
>
> <mauzbiz@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> news:1146781586.864406.79400@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> Worth remembering for "musem-quality" items is the mid-1960's IBM
>> random access "data cell", scarcely known and little deployed, that was
>> like a round carousel juke box that spun hundreds of magnetic strips
>> around until the chosen one was wrapped around a read/write head from
>> whence data could be read or to which data could be written. The
>> device had a capacity of 400 megabytes, far more random access storage
>> than most shops had online at any given time, and could access any data
>> in a few seconds. But it was expensive and I suspect attracted little
>> interest because most applications in those days were happily running
>> with an input tape, transaction tape or cards, and an output tape, and
>> companies were only beginning to explore random access files for
>> certain limited purposes, given the cost per megabyte.
>>
>> RCA had a version of this type of device, which, under certain
>> cir***stances of motion (back and forth), would inadvertently drop some
>> of its strips out the back of the machine, and some clever techie
>> programmed such a sequence and then announced to the operator "I've
>> lost one of my strips, could you please come over and help me out."
>>
>> I remember our IBM data cell from a summer job at California Western
>> States Life Insurance Company in Sacramento in 1966.
>>
>> It would be fascinating to bring into a musem such a first attempt at
>> leapfrogging the extremely limited 7 megabyte limitation that most
>> random access devices (usually removable disk pack drives) had even
>> into the late 1960's. Like bubble memory, its capabilities were
>> surpassed by other technological improvements and it never found a
>> significant niche.
>>
>
>
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