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From: mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Non-Discoid Very Large Mass Storage Systems
Message-ID: <29543@cup.portal.com>
Date: 3 May 90 04:40:35 GMT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 34

I'd like to know what technologies are competing with magnetic and optical
disk drives at the high end of the mass storage spectrum (high in terms
of capacity rather than speed).

In the old days (say, pre-1975), IBM had some weird thing that used canisters
of tape in a honeycomb array.  I think CDC had something similar.

Before that, there was the IBM 2311 data cell drive, Alan Shugart's first
really famous design.  A "data cell" was a magazine of tape strips, about
3 feet long and three inches wide.  The magazines were in a circular array.
A "picker arm" would reach into a magazine, grab a strip, and wrap it around
a drum.  After that, it would be read like a drum memory.  There was also
a mechanism to put the strip back in the magazine, I presume.
The machine's controller was a 16-bit minicomputer with 32K of core,
which was a pretty impressive computer (i.e. pdp-11 class) in those
days.

And there was the IBM 1360 Photodigital Storage System, a.k.a "Chipstore".
If I'm not mistaken, Los Alamos designed it, and IBM built three.  It used
tiny film cards, about 2.? x 3.? inches, which held 16384 somethings.  It had
gobs and gobs of these "chips".  In the late 70's, Lawrence Berkeley Lab
informed their user community that IBM was ceasing support for the machine,
and in the opinion of IBM engineers, LBL wouldn't be able to service it
themselves.  (The machine dates back to the mid-60's.)  It was such high
precision that a film chip written on one machine couldn't be read on another
machine.  LBL said they would shut down the writer one year before the
reader, in order to encourage users to move to other storage media (this was
announced in a message entitled "Enough Rope").  But when the time came to
shut down the reader, they decided to keep it available until it broke
down.  I never heard what happened after that.

What systems are comparable to these today, if any?  Does anyone know where
I can buy one of the antique machines, or significant parts of it, cheaply?
How much do you want for it?