During my mainframe computer days, someone made a foot or so long rod with a metal base. We would grab a handful of write rings and have a write ring tossing contest.
During the daytime the day shift would run dozens of batch jobs on the computer, and they would queue up in the printer queue because many jobs took only a short time to run then spent many minutes printing out on the high speed lineprinter. So the print queue was periodically redirected to tape. This tape was labeled and left for the evening shift operator to print out. As a result, there were a bunch of “scratch tapes” that were written to a lot in the first few dozen feet. This tended to wear that part of the tape a lot, so it eventually started giving errors when written to. So that’s when the operator would have to take action.
The operator would stand over a trash can and unreel 40 or more feet of tape that was worn and full of errors into the trash can and cut it off. I grabbed the worn tape one day and went outside and tied one end to the bldg. Then I went to the other end and pulled on it to see how far I could stretch it. I was amazed by how much it could be stretched out, before it refused to go any further.
After the operator cut off the few yards of bad tape at the beginning of the reel, he would have to stick some aluminized tape onto the tape to make the BOT – the beginning of the tape. Then the tape drive would know where to stop when it rewound back to the beginning.
We used to have sheets of the tape labels laying around and they got used for all sorts of stuff. I found them under the floor, wrapped around the cable ends to ID them. They were stuck to the front of the equipment to ID what port of the FNP – the mainframe’s front end network processor – it was connected to. They were like duct tape!
