General Information

Serial #

13-65391

Part Number

1

Total Parts

14

AKA

N/A

Patents

N/A

General Description

metal casing and parts/ synthetic control panels and parts

Dimensions

Note: These reflect the general size for storage and are not necessarily representative of the object's true dimensions.

Length

87.5 cm

Width

75.0 cm

Height

177.0 cm

Thickness

N/A

Weight

N/A

Diameter

N/A

Volume

N/A

Lexicon

Group

Computing Technology

Category

Digital computing devices

Sub-Category

N/A

Manufacturer

AKA

IBM

Country

United States of America

State/Province

Unknown

City

Unknown

Context

Country

Canada

State/Province

Ontario

Period

this example: 1996-2005

Canada

Part of the tape library retrieval system made by the American firm IBM and used at the Department of National Defence's Datacenter in Borden, ON. This Tape Robot subsystem is, due to the availability of huge hard drives and banks of interconnected servers, now obsolete. It is the last of its kind at DND and nothing like it will be purchased in the future, simply because all storage is moving in the direction of purely electronic media without any mechanical parts. The system was purchased and installed in 1996 by DND and dismantled in 2005.

Function

The tape drive control unit of an automated tape cartridge library, in which the retrieval, storage and control of data tape cartridges is carried out by a robotic handler, permitting the mounting and demounting of the cartridges on tape drives without operator intervention. The cartridge handling robot moves the cartridges to and from the related tape drives, input/output stations and storage racks within the system.

Technical

An example of a mid 1990's automated tape library combining robotics with magnetic tape data storage. The tape retrieval system includes a mobile robot and tape library system (IBM 3495) installed in a glass-walled cage. There is an eight feet high by 4 feet wide space in the front of the cage to afford a complete view of the operating robot. The whole unit consists of bolt-on longitudinal sections of 8 feet each. There is a track along the floor consisting of 8' sections, along which the tape robot travels. The basic tape library could be expanded from 5,660 - 18,900 tapes with up to 567 TB of memory when compressed. The robot was capable of mounting and demounting 360 tape cartridges per hour. The entire unit was approximately 75 feet long, mostly composed of sections of tape slot racks and side-attached tape reader stations. The facility held thousands of computer tapes each one stored in its own unique location and couple retrieved and returned by the robot. It provided the means to store and recall huge amounts of data in a fairly efficient manner for the period. Tapes were viewed as providing more security against damage than CDs and other optical storage media on which the long term life of the surface coatings was not known and the write times longer than to tapes. Tape technology had been in use in the computer industry for 4 decades and the switch to optical drives and then hard drive technologies was expensive. The IBM 3495 Tape Library Dataserver is an automated tape library that consists of one to four IBM 3490 Magnetic Tape Drive Subsystems, a Library Manager computer, a storage enclosure, and a tape cartridge accessor. The accessor incorporates a combination of IBM and OEM robotics and vision systems with application programs and special fixtures that provide automatic teaching and updating for up to 18,000 cell locations in the library. Command queueing allows continuous robotic motion, removing the performance penalty of communications with the Library Manager computer. The application program written for the vision system compensates for label tilt and spatial translation. A neural network with special filters ensures the quality of the labels read (Ref. 9). In the early 1990s, IBM launched the 36-track 3490E drive and a new extended-length chromium dioxide tape. The 3490E provided 800MB of storage in the same cartridge format as the earlier 3480. With Improved Data Recording Capability (IDRC), introduced in 1986, the capacity of the 3490E was expanded to over 2.4GB, the highest data capacity at that time. The IBM 3490 Enhanced Capability (3490E) Model A10 and A20 Control Units and B20 and B40 Drive Units were the newest members of the 3490 family of Magnetic Tape Subsystems when they were announced in February 1991. The B20 and B40 Tape Drive Units wrote in a new Enhanced Capability format. The new Enhanced Capacity Cartridge System Tape doubled the storage capacity of the cartridge and could reduce the number of cartridges needed for normal back-up and archival operations. Another benefit of the 3490E was that it could use IBM's new ESCON (Enterprise Systems Connection architecture) channel interface -- first delivered in 1987 -- to locate the tape subsystem up to 23 km (14.2 miles) from the processor (ES/3090, ES/9000, ES/9370, 308x or 4381) (Ref.10).

Area Notes

Unknown

Details

Markings

Label on upper casing reads ‘IBM/ 3490E A20' and ‘FOR SERVICE CALL/ 1-800-IBM-SERV/ MACHINE: 349C SERIAL: 13-65391/ partial label near lower corner of casing reads ‘3490 A01/A10/A02/A20/ V200-208/220/230-240/ A 10.2-10.0/9.6/9.3-9.0/ RATING PER LINE CORD/ KVA 0.6/ 0.3/ Hz 60 (Hz 50 JAPAN)/ Assembled in the U.S./ of U.S. and non-U.S./ Components./ Manufactured by/ IBM Corporation'/ label on upper casing reads ‘DND/MDN/ bar code/ NO 199759'

Missing

possibly one casing side section on .002

Finish

textured buff painted casing with textured black painted top panel/ textured grey synthetic control panels on front and back with black, blue and red controls/ black painted frame/ multicoloured synthetic and metal parts

Decoration

N/A