Toronto Old IBM Datacentre Renderings

This was linked in a Reddit thread about the old IBM Datacentre located on King St E in Toronto circa 1960's

I also wanted to link this hilarious story about operating the machines there:

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Ah, yes, Nosferatu.

That was the name for the reel-to-reel tape drives, for two reasons.

The tapes had to be fed manually into the input loop, until the light sensor detected the start of tape, at which point the automated feed would clasp the tape and start reeling it in automatically.

One of the problems was that on sunny days, the light coming through all that glass to the outside confused the tape sensor, and it would refuse to feed the tape. Operators would either have to shield the sensors from the light with their bodies (which was difficult), or wait for a cloud to go by, at which point the tape sensor would work properly until the sun came out again.

The other problem was that the tape clamp on some of the drives was a little too aggressive, and clamped down so quickly that the operator couldn't get his finger out of the way in time. There were lots of tape that had skin and blood from slower operators.

The tape drives had a taste for human flesh and drank their blood, but at least they were powerless in sunlight. And that's how the nickname "Nosferatu" came about.

They later added some kind of polarizing filter so that that outside light didn't confuse the light sensor (at least as much), as well as some safety features to cut down on the finger eating. Later models were a lot tamer, but operators would still occasionally get nipped by overly aggressive tape feeders.

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(Original comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/eojygy/the_ibm_dat...)