Really fascinating design...typical of IBM then and now. Spare no expense, not even for pity sake. Did you see those solid gold connectors? what on earth were all those wires doing?! It looked like a AMD processor glued to a rope. I like their solution to apparently not having stepper motors. That mechanical clutch style was widely used in cars at the time. My first car was a 1973 merc, and it had an entirely mechanical clutch fan! Now they just have cheap plastic electric fans. That thing was made out of machined aluminum, much like that IBM fan assembly in that video. Very elaborate and very cool. I want to hook that up to my commodore lol.
DC motors, like all others before and after. Commodore's datasette is definitely the result of a tape deck fornicating with a box window fan. Being the only tape drive system I know of that has a 9V AC motor. How awesome was that punched card machine too!? If you were offered free accommodations for a year, or that system, which would you choose?? I'd go with sleeping under a bridge with my IBM vacuum column without thinking. Not like anyone can steal it! It's too darn heavy!
I heard that the US army is actually phasing out their IBM system 1 machines that are running our defense networks :<. Now they are going to replace something that ran reliably for 60 years with something that will barely crawl past 6, and is made by a country that willfully makes fake chips/failure prone ones. Unless of course its another IBM system heh. They haven't let their standards slack at all.
Now being a guy who has a DEC PDP 11/03 clone, in the form of a Heathkit H-11, I can attest to the strength of those 8" floppy drives/construction of commercial grade drives. The dual drive weighs 90 lb(45kg) and is solid machined metal ($$$2600 clams in 1978 money _just_ for the dual drive!). You couldn't wipe the data on those disks in the drive if you had a defribulator handy. I really want to make a large scale reel to reel tape drive with RS232 I/O...that way I can use it with an RS232 adapter on the user port of the commodore and use the built in RS232 routines I read about for passing bytes out, or in etc in the kernal, or with TU58 format on the H-11 which has native rs232 for, well pretty much everything. Even for the terminal. I'm not sure if it is considered heresy to mention Heathkits here though lol...I think that is more VCfed territory, but hey since we are talking vintage mainframe tape drives
. But its why I mention RS232 being a goal if I eventually made one. Then set the baud rate within the standard.
Another tape system in the mainframe world to look at is the DC300, and subsequent DC100 drive HP scaled down for the HP85. which was way more complicated, but much faster. I don't even think we've touched on the major elephant in the room though. Which is semi-modern tape systems such as LTO 1,2,3,4,5etc.., which are quite inexpensive now. There is also the AIT drive Sony tape drives etc. One drive I saw and I wished I had memorized the make and model, was a tape backup that used regular cassettes but held a whopping 600 mbs, or at least that was the claim! LTO-1 can easily hold 100gb, and AIT I believe holds 20 megs uncompressed. I have one of those backup drives on my 386 portable. I did open it up to see where the cpu battery was/why it wasn't working, but beyond getting it working, I didn't check the tape drive model. Might be an avenue to explore if one isn't looking for vintage eye candy like a RTR tape machine.
The other cool eye candy cassette tech is the "Open cassette" which is crazy cool looking. has metal reels and looks like a miniature RTR spool with metal guards on the sides guarding the actual tape. you spool it into the tape, and then install it into the regular deck. Another idea I had was to make a micro retro RTR deck using this type of setup, As a spool of cassette tape is quite small, as would be the mini-RTR home-brew deck. Which I would paint light blue and make it to look like a good ol' mainframe floor model tape system of course...