A lady who is now retired, but used to work in a job which took her regularly between Britain and America, has given me some pictures of a machine which she was asked to photograph in America about 20 years ago (or more?). She never knew what the machine was or what it did, but she understood it was a prototype for something which was being patented at the time.
I have scanned the pictures in detail and uploaded them to:
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...they are all different views of the same machine.
Does anyone have any idea what it might have been?
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~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk
It looks like a tape recorder, and it looks like no tape recorder I have ever seen!
in photo 1 there are two stacks of platters with what appears to be coils of 1/4" magnetic tape sitting on them and feeding out over rollers underneath the stacks are two motors with solenoids that work brakes (or clutches?) and a panel with 4 trimpots,
photo 2 is a close-up of the platters , on the left the idlers that keep the tape tight can be seen in different positions.
3 seems to be a photp of the same machine from above with the platters and tape removed. at the bottom of the image what looks like the bit with the tape heads in it to the right and above an arm with unknown purpose.
4 from 45 dedrees to the right of photo 1 with the platters removed we see into the tape heads enclosure. and a braced structure with a handle in-font of the tape heads
5 from behind (135degrees right of photo 1) we see tape loaded and the motor with a flywheel (or possibly some sort of govenor) on the bottom that drive the pinch rollers that maintain the speed the tape runs at.
the "handle" which was horizontal in 4 has been tilted up perhaps releasing pressure pads in the braced structure to hold the tape against the heads.
I don't think a machine like this would keep good enough synchronisation to play synchronised tracks from all the tapes symultaneously so I don't judge it to be a multi-track player.
possibly this was a machine to duplicate (well, pentuplicate) 1/4" audio tape
I didn't find the patent on-line (but I didn't search hard)
On a sunny day (10 Oct 2008 11:58:41 GMT) it happened Jasen Betts wrote in :
Thuis remind me of some machine we had at the studio, IIRC its purpose was to record x number of programs for archive. The pots at the front would be record level perhaps? Some NSA gadget of old times, tape 10 phone conversations, things like that perhaps. But I think ours had one very wide tape with a whole bunch of heads... IIRC it was often kaput too..
Looks like one of those machines to play recorded messages over the phone. You could have X messages. Or one message with X variations. With a little switching maybe it could tell the time.
I see a prototype for an IBM RAMAC disk drive. I never saw one with dual spindles though. The magnets on the drive motors would be brakes and the head (it moved platter to platter) is at the bottom of the upper right platter. My guess at the time frame would be early to mid
1950's.
John Ferrell W8CCW
If I look at it longer, I might see something else?
Definitely a high speed tape duplicator. Stacking slaves like that was a way to save floor space compared to individual slave recorders. They were popular for duplicating 8 track and cassette tapes, but this one looks old enough to be from the four track reel to reel era. I worked on quite a few of these recorders but this one looks home made or a prototype so I couldn't suggest a brand name.
She has now remembered further, more accurate, information:
The machine wasn't in America, it was in the American Sector of Germany at Heidelberg - and she photographed it at least 50 years ago. She thinks that one of the people involved in the design of the machine was named 'Prentice'.
My own comments, for what they are worth, are:
1) The 'spools' do not appear to have hubs, so tape winding would not have been possible. Therefore I do not think they were tape spools and I do not think that tape was involved. Picture MC5.jpg appears to include tape loops, but closer inspection of the perspective around the top and second discs of the stack shows that this is just an optical illusion.
2) The motors would have run at around 300 rpm or 1500 rpm (depending on the number of poles), so would the stack of discs. This explains the need for a top bearing to stabilise the stack and solenoid brakes to stop the rotation fairly quickly.
3) The bottom disc in MC1.jpg and MC5.jpg is level with the camera. From this it appears that the item on the end of the arm was not able to move across the surface of the disc, but might have made contact with the outer edge. These items could be tape heads in mu-metal cans.
By putting together all the information we have so far, and with some knowledge of the way the computer industry was developing at the time, I wonder if this might have been a dynamic memory similar to a drum store but with easily replaceable disc stacks.
--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk
She has now remembered further, more accurate, information:
The machine wasn't in America, it was in the American Sector of Germany at Heidelberg - and she photographed it at least 50 years ago. She thinks that one of the people involved in the design of the machine was named 'Prentice'.
My own comments, for what they are worth, are:
1) The 'spools' do not appear to have hubs, so tape winding would not have been possible. Therefore I do not think they were tape spools and I do not think that tape was involved. Picture MC5.jpg appears to include tape loops, but closer inspection of the perspective around the top and second discs of the stack shows that this is just an optical illusion.
2) The motors would have run at around 3000 rpm or 1500 rpm (depending on the number of poles), so would the stack of discs. This explains the need for a top bearing to stabilise the stack and solenoid brakes to stop the rotation fairly quickly.
3) The bottom disc in MC1.jpg and MC5.jpg is level with the camera. From this it appears that the item on the end of the arm was not able to move across the surface of the disc, but might have made contact with the outer edge. These items could be tape heads in mu-metal cans.
By putting together all the information we have so far, and with some knowledge of the way the computer industry was developing at the time, I wonder if this might have been a dynamic memory similar to a drum store but with easily replaceable disc stacks.
--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk
they are not spools they are platters (the is no upper wall visible just the lower platform) I see hubs, approvimitely 6x the diameter of the axle. in mc1 you can see the end of the tape sticking up from the hub of both lower platters,
in the first photo see the tape running past slack ajusters and ilder rollers to the left of the plattrr column (this idler column is the column to the far right of MC3)
??? the top and second disks appear to be holding less tape than the other three disks, the machine would not run like this, but it's possible it was staged for the photo shoot.
assuming they are squirrel-cage motors and not allowed to slip, also assuming the hubs are fixed rigidly to the axle and the axle is fixed ridigly to the motor, - that's a lot of assumptions.
the motors seem oversized, perhaps they are being run at lower than normal voltage and allowed to slip,. running at a low speed.
the item on the end of the arm appears to me to be a roller that stops the machine when it is moved by a full layer of tape.
why use the edge of several widely spaced disks instead of a drum.
The whole session was definitely 'staged'; the photographer has told me that she remembers using an open shutter and 'painting' the machine with light to get the best possible picture.
They do appear to be direct drive with no gearing or belts, but they might be DC motors and have brushgear which is not visible. If the machine handles tape, mechanical slip would have to take place between each individual 'platter' and the shaft, otherwise how would it cope with slight differences in rotational speeds as the tape stacks built up?
There appears to be a third motor of a larger type which, if the machine does handle tape, could be the capstan motor. (See: MC5.jpg)
It seems a bit elaborate for that, but it might just be a tape guide roller.
To save magnetic material/inertia/storage space? To allow space for the head shields? To give independent interchange of discs and data?
--
~ Adrian Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk
Yes and the big lump on the bottom is probably a centrifugal speed regulator.
It is a 5 reel tape recorder. The interesting questions are :-
Why not have one wide tape? Because they could utilise off the shelf 1/4" tape and read/write/erase heads perhaps?
Why not use 5 complete off the shelf tape recorders? Because there were size/packaging restrictions? Perhaps it was a portable data recorder for use on a vehicle or plane?
Changing tape looks very impractical so I guess it was intended to record something and play it back once.
The only other thing I can think of is some strange serial tape to tape to tape data processing storage device but the above questions still apply.
Perhaps because magnetic tape was at very experimental stage at that time (an assumption), this was simply a rig to compare various types of tape materials using simultaneous recording and playback. This might explain why one reel has smaller bulk (thinner substrate) than the others. Who was manufacturing magnetic tape back then. BASF perhaps ??
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