General Information

Serial #

940945

Part Number

1

Total Parts

1

AKA

N/A

Patents

N/A

General Description

metal casing and parts/ synthetic casing front, handle, controls panel and controls, power cord, parts/ glass screen cover

Dimensions

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

Length

27.5 cm

Width

22.0 cm

Height

24.5 cm

Thickness

N/A

Weight

N/A

Diameter

N/A

Volume

N/A

Lexicon

Group

Communications

Category

Television

Sub-Category

N/A

Manufacturer

AKA

Javelin

Country

United States of America

State/Province

California

City

Torrance

Context

Country

Canada

State/Province

Ontario

Period

this example: 1996-2005

Canada

Possibly 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

A video display unit which displays video received from a video camera or other source. This example may have been part of an automated tape cartridge library, in which the retrieval, storage and control of data tape cartridges was carried out by a robotic handler, permitting the mounting and demounting of the cartridges on tape drives without operator intervention.

Technical

An output device used with 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.

Area Notes

Unknown

Details

Markings

Raised metallic lettering on front reads ‘JAVELIN'/ label on back reads in part ‘MODEL NO.: BWM9/ POWER: 30W 60Hz/ 100/117 VAC/ JAVELIN ELECTRONICS/ 19831 Magellan Drive, Torrance, CA 90502 U.S.A./ MANUFACTURED SEP. 1994/ MADE IN KOREA'/ label on back reads ‘SERIAL NO./ 940945'/ stamped on back ‘MADE IN KOREA'

Missing

appears complete

Finish

textured buff painted casing/ black casing front, controls/ grey control panel/ red and yellow buttons/ grey power cord/ grey screen/ colourless transparent glass

Decoration

N/A