9-track tape seals

[Bob Bradlee]

I missd that, Who was looking for writeline tape seals?

I currently have several hundred along with several wrightlint tape racks I plan to put on ebay next week fro 
a friend.

Feel free to contact me directly if you or anyone has a need. I threw out close to 1,000 9 track tapes with 
seals last week.

THe other Bob


On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 09:23:14 -0400, Tim  Shoppa wrote:

>Al made a comment about looking for Wright Line tape seals.

>A story of mine:

>In the 90's I got to spend a lot of time sitting in tape libraries
>filled with tens of thousands of tapes hanging on racks from the
>hook on the tape seal.

>During a typical stretch (say 8 hours nominal) one or two
>tape seals would break and the tape would get dumped
>to the floor. Sometimes the seal would break in response
>to some kind of vibration in the room (after all, there were
>several tape drives getting loaded/unloaded etc. as
>well as me rummaging through the racks looking for tapes) but
>other times they seemed to break with absolutely no reason.

>Sometimes the black plastic hanger would break but more
>typically the white plastic seal would break near the hanger.

>I'd say from this that out of a library of 30,000 tapes
>with several tape seals breaking every day, that the expected
>MTBF of those Wright-line tape seal is probably 30 years.

>That's not necessarily the same as lifetime. As the plasticizers
>dry out I'd expect them to break more often. Sunlight and ozone+
>heat can really do a doozy on plastics.

>The hard-plastic IBM tape seals seemed to be very much
>more vulnerable to breaking in transport than the Wright
>lines, and they'd also occasionally fail just hanging there on
>the tape rack, but I'm reluctant to make any statistical
>statements about them because so many were obviously
>broken in transport.