Everybody talks about the disco lady, and yes, she is deserving of attention...but there's also this poor blighter in the same scene:
If you'd like some fun next time you ride, just imagine the following audio for this clipboard carrying fellow:
"1, 2, 4...sonuva...1, 2, 7....ugh....1,2,yellow....dangit that's a color....1, 2, ham...I hate this job."
Hey everyone - I can share some trivial info on the 'tape guy'. Back in the day, mainframes used reel to reel tapes to record and retrieve data. This guy is probably the 'tape librarian', or a 'tape mount' person who is responsible for getting the tapes in order for a particular batch job that is running on the mainframe. Back in the day, you would have a bank of tape drives, and the tape mounter would watch a computer screen, and when a tape mount was asked for from the mainframe, the tape mounter would go to a rack and pull the requested tape number and mount it on what ever tape drive the system was asking for. At the start of a shift, the tape mounter, or tape operator would also print out a list of 'scratch' tapes (tapes that would be blank that data could be written to). It was not uncommon for an operator to go down the racks and pull tapes and fill up each of his arms with tapes, to get them ready for the his shift. On a given shift, he might have to mount well over 100 tapes.Fast forward to today. These reel to reel tapes have been replaced with tapes that look like an 8 track cartridge, and are stored in silos that have robotic arms. When the system calls for a tape mount, the robot looks for the tape in it's storage bin in the silo, removes it from its slot, and places it in the tape drive that is inside the silo. No more actual person needed to mount tapes, or a librarian to keep track of racks and racks of tapes.
Now - technology is moving to a 'virtual tape', and 'virtual tape drives' that are located in the computers memory.
Just some in site to the 'old' and the 'new'.
The mainframe isn't going away, it is still very much in use - just the way it's being used is changing. I should know - been doing mainframe computer operations for over 20 years, and I'm not going away anytime soon!