Look for a new version of the IBM 3490 tape drive soon, perhaps as soon as tomorrow: the new model is said to eliminate rewind time by recording in both directions to get 36 tracks – 18 in each direction to double capacity: it should stream at 9M-bytes per second on Escon channels and include between 4Mb to 8Mb of cache in the controller; an interlink feature between controllers is also expected, to enable the controllers of two strings installed side by side to exchange buffer segments and share their resources.
