Re: Floppy drives on ancient AS/400's

I believe there was one vertical column tape drive supported on the earliest machines. Most though were rack mounted about 5U or available as table top with a cover.

The most common early unit was 1600 and 3200 BPI (the later not a standard density) It had a smoked color plastic door that you really couldn't see through. The control panel was terrible and it was so unreliable it was referred to as the '9347 piece of shit.' IBM replaced the planar board in ours half a dozen times. It was not an IBM manufactured drive. The 9348 replace it and it did 1600 and 6250 BPI. (It could not read the 3200 BPI tapes) It was fabulously more reliable and the same size as the older unit. Tapes in these were slid into the front like a pizza.



On 5/21/2021 1:37 PM, James H. H. Lampert wrote:

On 5/21/21 10:26 AM, Steinmetz, Paul via MIDRANGE-L wrote:

In the late 80's our S/38 had the below.

8" floppy     - Used for system maintenance.

Hmm. As it happens, the 4341 I mentioned in another thread had 8" floppy drives buried inside at least one, and possibly several, of the cabinets.

BTW, are there any pictures of what a 1/2" reel tape drive even *looks like* on an AS/400? Does it look like your typical mainframe tape drive, vacuum columns and all? (I think the only place I can recall seeing tape drives of that sort in operation, in person, is at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, on their restored IBM 1401 [and maybe also their restored PDP-1, although I think *that* uses a *punched paper tape* drive]).

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JHHL