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TG-20
A Rather Pointless Story
Area: talk.bizarre Date: 06 Dec 93 12:13:53 From: nikolai kingsley To: all Subj: the saga of the TG-20 This story is true. Only the device name, the company name and the name of the place where they were used have been changed. I was the only one who ever appreciated the hidden joke in the name of the device. It was essentially a reel-to-reel tape deck with a fucked-up Analogue-to-digital device attached, with some additional control circuitry that sort of handshook between the A-D part and the tape drive. There was only one company that made them - Ellitronics, Inc - and they were the only ones who were authorised to maintain them. The TG-20 was a backup device for the strange consoles that were used in air traffic control. I never pretended to understand them, but apparently, when things got complicated over there, they had to dump about thirty meg of data offline for an hour or so, and the TG-20 was the device which it got dumped to. If the data wasn't restored immediately afterwards, the ATC consoles would lose track of a couple of planes, which lent an air of desperation to the proceedings. The damn things were always breaking down. We had seven of them, three of which were never working, two of which would sometimes work, and the remaining two were used in rotation. When one of the two working models started giving regular checksum failures, we'd start sweating. I spoke to the manager about them, and he guardedly said that there wasn't anything he could do beyond authorising the purchase of two more backup units, which we did. "They're fucked. The design is fucked, the implementation is fucked, and the whole idea is fucked." The manager threw up his hands in resignation. "I know ... I know ... the regulations don't permit use of any other devices. I've been onto them for almost six years, and they won't budge." I began to wonder if someone up there had a personal stake in using these things. (oh, the hidden joke in the name? Throbbing Gristle, one of - if not the first - industrial bands, used tape devices very much like the TG-20 to do audio sampling and loops for their performances. I used to wonder if Sleasy and Gen had something to do with the design of the TG-20, then I realised they had more integrity than that.) Well, one evening we were down to our last unit, and it was beginning to fuck up. Deanna and I twiddled everything we could and kept it going until the peak was past, but it was getting pretty hairy at one point; I recall taking a tape from one unit to three others before we found one that would recover the data. That morning, when I arrived back at the flat, I threw myself down on the couch and announced to Mike, the sysop, "Fuck it. I don't care if the FTC or PTC or whatever the fuck-TC don't allow it, I'm not going to work with those fucked-up tape recorders any more." Mike grinned. He'd heard all about the TG-20s from me, at length. I once borrowed (er, stole) some specifications for the data that the ATC consoles sent, he'd looked at it and run up an MS-DOS program that would emulate the TG-20 in software. 115 k through the parallel port, four and three quarter minutes to store the whole dump as opposed to fifteen to twenty minutes on the TG-20. I had gone out and bought a 386 with a 170 meg SCSI with my own money. We installed it without telling the supervisor and asked one of the controllers to let us test it. It worked flawlessly, of course, and when the manager saw it, he agreed (unofficially) to the purchase of a second 386 with a tape drive. We could fit five dumps on each hard drive easily. It was great. We had time to play Scorch on the second machine, and the TG-20s sat in the corner gathering dust. But one day, the manager got a call from Ellis, the guy who owned the company that made the TG-20. He wanted to know why our maintenance calls had dropped off sharply. I was in his office when he took the call, and his face went pale. I snatched the phone off him and said, "Mr Ellis. we've made a few minor modifications to our TG-20 units which drastically improve performance and reduce wear, which is why we haven't needed any maintenance on our nine units." I could hear the guy starting to bluster about unauthorised modifications and how he was going to have us all fired, so I cut him off: "and before you start making any noise, I'm sure the current affairs programs would be interested in hearing about why an inherently FUCKED piece of machinery like the TG-20 is the standard for offline data storage when the damn things rarely work for more than ten minutes at a stretch." Funny how some people shut up as soon as you mention Current Affairs ... Anyone want to buy a tape deck?
Area: talk.bizarre Date: 06 Dec 93 15:49:44 From: nikolai kingsley To: all Subj: the previous post i'm sorry. i don't know why i wrote that. |
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