And whatever happened to Juan???

He went off to start a company called Exabyte. They did a high density tape drive based on a Sony hand held video recorder. It was pretty neat. Very high capacity with strong error correction. They would just write it until it read back with some error margin. I think he is doing venture capital now. He was on my board at Aspen for a while. Super guy.
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/exabyte-corporation-history/

 

Tape drives are still handy if you want to ship the data around or archive it. But the density of disk drives kind of passed them by. I spent about 20 years in that business with IBM, Storage Tek, and Aspen Peripherals. Two start ups. Lots of fun and work.

Tape technology is still advancing.
https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201404/14-044E/index.html

 

He went off to start a company called Exabyte. They did a high density tape drive based on a Sony hand held video recorder. It was pretty neat. Very high capacity with strong error correction. The would just write it until it read back with some error margin. I think he is doing venture capital now. He was on my board at Aspen for a while. Super guy.
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/exabyte-corporation-history/

Career details here...
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702129

Until he moved to university of Colorado...
https://ecee.colorado.edu/fac_staff/personnel_pages/rodriguez.html

 

He went off to start a company called Exabyte. They did a high density tape drive based on a Sony hand held video recorder. It was pretty neat. Very high capacity with strong error correction. The would just write it until it read back with some error margin. I think he is doing venture capital now. He was on my board at Aspen for a while. Super guy.
http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/exabyte-corporation-history/

Did he look like this?

​

In case you're too old to know ... he's one of the characters in The Flash tv series.

 

Career details here...
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702129

Until he moved to university of Colorado...
https://ecee.colorado.edu/fac_staff/personnel_pages/rodriguez.html

Wow! ... it seems that our good friend Ron worked with one of the greats... if it's not the other way around...

 

When you said, it was a startup, I automatically assumed it failed. The StorageTek name survives

https://www.oracle.com/storage/tape-storage/index.html

Well, it did fail. It just took it 15 years to do it.
Back in those days the mainframe market was mostly lease based. We could sell them for about 3 times what it cost us to build them. So we would sell one to a leasing company, lease one ourselves, and build another one. After 5 years we would share in the lease revenue with the leasing companies. So after about 6 or 7 years we didn't know what to do with all the money. But the optical disk and a CPU program (both R&D partnerships) broke us in the end. But it did make it to a billion dollars.
I was lucky enough to be there before we had a pencil and watch it grow. Cost me a lot of sleep and a first wife, but I think it was worth it.

 

Did he look like this?

View attachment 124099
​

In case you're too old to know ... he's one of the characters in The Flash tv series.

Come on, keep up with the conversation, he was working with magnetic memory, not flash.

 

Did he look like this?

View attachment 124099
​

In case you're too old to know ... he's one of the characters in The Flash tv series.

He looked a bit like that.

But his son look almost exactly like that.
Thanks for looking him up. I lost track of him.

 

Are there any equivalent printers still working nowadays?

I had a line printer nearly that old, but I dropped in the trash can for taking 6 minutes to print a page.
Besides that, it was awful at printing copies of photographs.

 

Tape technology is still advancing.
https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201404/14-044E/index.html

Interesting. I helped a friend with a business plan for an optical tape drive. Kodak wanted to make the tape and the optical head. - actually I think they wanted to do anything but cameras at that point. Couldn't quite get them to go for it. I had some experience with MO disk drives by then so I thought we could do it. I think they were bleeding money at that time. The high density turns into a mechanical/servo problem. But if you could manage that there is not much to keep it from getting closer to disk densities.

 

it was awful at printing copies of photographs.

But great at printing text... I'm sure

 

 

But great at printing text... I'm sure

I can remember some life sized girly pictures.

 

Lots of ascii art out there ....

 

Not as fine art a s ascii, but baudot did produce some decent pictures.




One never knew what comes across the teletype during mid-watches .... most times the originator didn't follow proper protocol by identifying themselves.

The bad thing is as NET CONTROL, we had to ensure it was inappropriate before halting it, after we got a cup of coffee.

 

Not as fine art a s ascii, but baudot did produce some decent pictures.

Where did you hide the 5-level paper-tapes for pictures? The TTY repairman had most of them in his shop for testing repairs and rebuilds. If the prints (the original and the carbon copy) passed his inspection then the machines were good to go.

 

We didn't hide things. Hell, we were making copies for the CO.

They were good to test the rtty circuit as well. Lol

You know there were always resends so someone could turn on their tape machine ... Paper tape......

 

 

Best story correction:
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...hter-who-made-homophobic-comments-on-facebook

Correction: A lawyer interviewed by the Citizen provided incorrect details about the case of an elevator repairman who was fired due to the contents of a video posted to social media. The elevator repairman did not post a video of himself exposing his genitals while wearing a company T-shirt. In fact, the repairman allowed a video to be taken of him stapling his scrotum to a wooden plank while at work, and his colleague posted the video, which could clearly identify both the company and the employees involved. The repairman was not wearing a company T-shirt. The story has been updated.