Imation was the old 3M tape/disk group. I though they were long gone.
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I still have an Imation LS-120 floppy drive and disks.
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In 1970 I was offered a job there but I did not want to leave Silicon Valley. Friends that did go to 3M came back within a couple of years.
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Bob Macklin
K5MYJ
Seattle, Wa.
"Real Radios Glow In The Dark"
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----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, November 01, 2017 2:38 PM
Subject: Re: [hp_agilent_equipment] Re: HP Archives lost to fire.
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It appears to be Imation, Fuji and Sony there where others in the past but a few stopped making the media, vendors of the drives probably sell media with thier name on it but do not actually manufacture the tapes.? The licensed manufacturers of LTO drives
are IBM, HP, Quantum and Tandberg.?? Both IBM and STK make large tape libraries that use LTO tape.? LTO is a direct decendant of IBMs half inch cartridge technology.
Paul.
On 2017-11-01 6:28 PM, Bob Macklin
macklinbob@... [hp_agilent_equipment] wrote:
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Who makes the tape these days? The 3M and Ampex tape operations are gone.
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Bob Macklin
K5MYJ
Seattle, Wa.
"Real Radios Glow In The Dark"
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, November 01, 2017 2:10 PM
Subject: Re: [hp_agilent_equipment] Re: HP Archives lost to fire.
?
That is good news. I was part of the StorageTek tape team and later a member of the virtual tape team (for sixteen years), up until this past January. Many, many people with whom I had worked for decades are gone from the real tape team. The virtual tape
team was also impacted, but to a lesser degree. I intend to pay close attention going forward to what Oracle does with these product lines.
The T10K tape drives are masterpieces of electromechanical engineering, and the thought of that going away has bothered me since the layoffs in January.
Oracle could easily satisfy the needs of the cloud using LTO drives. The only reason to keep the FICON drives around would be for cloud applications that are based on IBM MVS mainframes, which use the FICON channel interface.
But, as you write, I never under (or over) estimate what will happen in the future. It ain't my job to do that anymore.
DaveD
On 11/1/2017 1:47 PM, Bob Bownes
bownes@... [hp_agilent_equipment] wrote:
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I speak not for my employer, but Oracle was building their own tape drives as part of the former StorageTek. There were some layoffs in that organization, but the death of tape has not come yet. In fact, I would speculate that one cannot be a large cloud
storage service provider without owning an awful lot of tape.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a large cargo aircraft full of mag tape. Sure, the latency sucks¡:)
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And tape is being looked at more closely these days as the only unhackable storage medium.
Until recently, Oracle (which was Sun which was StorageTek) was selling IBM-compatible tape drives with multi-TB capacities. I'm pretty sure Oracle nuked that business earlier this year.
DaveD
On 11/1/2017 9:44 AM, Dave McGuire
Mcguire@... [hp_agilent_equipment] wrote:
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On 11/01/2017 01:05 AM, Bob Macklin
macklinbob@...
[hp_agilent_equipment] wrote:
> Lived and worked in Silicon Valley as an EE. First mostly in the
> magnetic tape industry?and in the hard disk industry.
> ?
> The magnetic tape industry shrank until all thaw left was Ampex. Ampex
> no longer makes disk drives. As far as I can tell there are no tape
> drives being made any more.
That's incorrect; tape is still king in terms of capacity and
reliability. IBM's recently-announced TS2280 drive holds 12TB,
uncompressed, per cartridge.
While amongst some people (not you. more "these kids today") it's
considered fashionable and "cool" to dismiss tape as a passe' old
technology, the reality is different.
> I worked with a lot of the HP analog instruments of the 60's. There
> seems to be no need for them anymore as today's consumer electronics is
> not repairable.
Whoa there, Sparky. There's more to electronics than consumer gear,
and there's more to electronic work than repair. I use and depend upon
those very instruments every day in the course of my work.
> I also worked with the HP-2100 series computers in the 70's. I also
> worked with DEC and DG minicomputers. They are gone now also.
Yes, the companies are gone, but not forgotten. If you ever make it
to Pittsburgh, visit the Large Scale Systems Museum for a personal tour
(and hack time, if desired) of some of those machines, including an HP
2116B and more DEC PDPs than you can shake a stick at, up and running.
> Where are Keysight's modern instruments used? Is there any electronic
> development being done in the US today?
There's plenty of development being done in the US today. That's the
space I work in; I see it every day. Personally I'm a contract
electronic designer, based in Pittsburgh. In the course of my work,
I've come to know many other guys (and gals) doing the same thing I'm
doing, and I've worked with a lot of companies who are doing it,
especially around here. (Pittsburgh is a hotbed of technology today)
Things are pretty bleak in American business today, but real design
work is far from dead. Much of it seems to have moved to contract
design companies rather than in-house, though.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
