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After arriving in Westmont, IL, with my truck, I tried to stop by the UHAUL location I'd chosen to pick up a trailer to help move the tape drives in. Aparently, UHAUL doesn't actually check to make sure that the location is open when you make a reservation... after some trouble trying to pick up the trailer from another location, I decided to give up on that, and see how much of the system I could fit into my "computer mover" - a 1989 Chevy 1-ton box van.
I arrived at Phoenix Data Processing, met with the person I had been talking to about picking up the tape drive system, and met with their "IT Guy." Phoenix is in the business of bulk mail and dealing with snail-mail address lists - as I was told, "the bigger, the better." They appear to have been running on IBM mainframe systems since the mid 1970s, and are working on migrating to PCs to do their work. While it might seem saddening that they're moving to a PC platform, it also means that the old/obsolete mainframe hardware gets a second life in the hands of some lucky collectors. :)
I arrived, and the 3420/3803 setup was still set up, and plugged in (but mostly turned off). I opend a few side panels on the devices, pulled up some raised flooring, and got to work at disconnecting everything. The individual units aren't bolted together, everything is just lined up neatly with some "coat-hanger" wheel locks to keep them from moving around.
3420 drive to 3803 controller data cable
After a couple hours of work, I had the tape drives separated, and ready to be rolled into the truck. Fortunately, there were a few people at the ready to help move the units into my truck. Fortunately, everythign fit in the truck without requiring a second trip - but I'm sure that the springs on my truck were aching! I made a 3.5 hour drive through Chicago rush-hour traffic back to Lafayette.
Because of rain the day after the pickup, we waited a day to unload the machines.
With a few friends to help, I got the drives unloaded from the truck. Two of them are rather picture shy, so I altered a picture of one of them a bit before posting... Anyways, the drives were in the truck, and needed to be removed into the building.
After a few things had been unloaded, here's the last two 3420s that I had in the truck (one is getting shipped off somewhere else, and didn't get removed):
After wrangling the drives in, I took a few photos, and made some measurements. The 3803-2 controller is actually fairly light compared to the drives which are heavy beasts.
The 3803-2 controller is a device that connects up to eight of the 3420 tape drives up to Bus & Tag attached mainfame systems. It can also support some redundancy - you can hook each drive up to two different controllers, and you can attach up to two different mainframe channels (from the same, or different, machines) up to controllers, if you have the right options.
3803 model 2 specs
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Inside the 3803 controller, there's 5 card cages (with a yellow rats next of wires on sone of the backplanes), a C.E.'s (customer engineer) diagnostic panel, and power distribution and power supplies in the bottom of the cabinet, along with the connectors to connect to the mainframe (Bus & Tag) on the left of the back, and a column of eight tape data connectors.
Power supply unit - large power resistors at center
CE control panel
The CE panel allowed the IBM service technician (or Customer Engineer in IBM-speak) to diagnose problems with the tape drives and controller. It has controls to allow you to control either of the two onboard microprocessors, including single stepping through the microcode on the controller, executing intsructions you enter via the toggle switches, etc.
The IBM 3420 model 8 tape drive was released in 1973, and was IBM's top of the line tape device at the time, commonly used on IBM System/360s and System/370s for data storage. The 3420 model 8 could store about 150MB of data on a single 10.5" tape reel.
3420 model 8 specs:
| Left | Front |
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| Right | Back |
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The tape drive featured an electrically operated window for access to the tape, and an operator's panel, with several indicator lamps (top row), several buttons for controlling the drive (bottom row), a label with the drive's channel address, and an hour meter.
There's a small card set in the 3420 drive itself, with a nice and messy backplane full of the requisite yellow wire-wrap wires.
Setting up the system for use is waiting for me to get 3-phase power to run the drives off of first.
Eventually, I hope to scan the documentation that I got with the 3420 tape drives, and the 3803 controller, and put it online.
Last updated - Sat Apr 29 18:36:32 EDT 2006
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