Computer History: The Amazing Design of the UNIVAC's UNISERVO METAL TAPE DRIVES 1951

Computer History: The 1951 UNIVAC UNISERVO Metal Tape Drive, the first use of digital magnetic tape reel devices on computers. Tapes were made of a Nickel-Bronze alloy and weighed 4 pounds each! This film describes the drives in detail and shows the UNISERVOs in operation. An educational presentation from the Computer History Archives Project (CHAP). Narration: David Melvin.

Topics Include:
Vintage Computers
UNIVAC, UNISERVO
Magnetic Storage
Digital Tape
Magnetic Tape Reels
Data Processing
Business Computing
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Co.
Remington Rand UNIVAC
Binary Data Encoding
** - See For Related References:
UNISERVO Tape Reader Recorder (1952, Welsh, Lukof)
UNIVAC Scientific Magnetic Tape System 1956
Basic Programming UNIVAC 1 (1958, 1959) Pg. 122

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[michaelfaklis]

An interesting engineering aspect of the Uniservo was that the tape movement across the heads was not done by servos, but by air pressure. There were two vacuum chambers, one on each side of the heads. Tape movement across the heads was accomplished by adjusting the air pressure in the two vacuum chambers. The tape servo motors were not accurate enough to maintain the proper tape speed. Take a look at the guy mounting a tape. He doesn't wrap the tape end around the opposite reel, as you would with an audio tape on a reel-to-reel. He connects the tape end to a leader tape segment which is already running through both vacuum chambers and around the take-up reel.

[woodhonky]

I imagine those metallic tapes could take a paper cut to the next level.

[Lazarus]

I believe the saying is "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of tapes".

[Astinsan]

OMG.. I just realized how this was utilized.. each tape machine is a table for a database.... it’s also pretty amazing that a single double density 5 1/4” disk was 3x larger than one reel of tape for these machines.

[HelloKittyFanMan]

Only FOUR HOURS? Whoof, that's A-BLAZIN'!

[carolbarlow]

I have a reel in my basement, those were the days!

[HelloKittyFanMan]

Interesting that while the tapes can be written in only forward, they can be read in both directions!

[mspysu]

4 pounds per 8" diameter reel of 1/2" tape, there is a reason that the world went to mylar/polyester base tape and plastic reels.

[ultort]

Today, fedexing a HDD is stil a good and fast way to transfer terabytes of data. Amazon propose a service (AWS Snowball) for mailing a module of HDDs to sending up to 1 Petabyte of data to their servers.

[marklandgraf]

1.5 million characters is approximately the same as 224 KB? Huh?

[jterry]

4 hours then or a 32nd of a second now

[larrygall]

2:55 Sending a tape to Vito Corleone.

[NRCPOR]

What's the name of the film shown in 3:45?