Talk:UNIVAC 9000 series

Not mentioned on the main page is a variant of the 9400, that was designated as Univac 9480. The difference, is that the 9400 used plated wire memory, while the 9480 had early solid state memory. The place I worked (1973-1977) had a 9400, with 192K of memory. Each 6-foot cabinet held 64k of plated wire memory. We also had two Univac 1004 printer / card readers, which were attached via I/O cables to the mainframe. The 9400 could be booted either from disk or tape. We used disk, but I did make an OS/4 boot tape one night, just to see if it worked. Very slow way to get things done. Cosmicray (talk) 20:39, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

The printer in the picture is a Univac 0768 model. Contrary to the textual description, it was a revolving drum printer. There were 132 hammers behind the paper, and they fired at the correct instant to catch the character on the drum rotation. The printer could handle up to 6-part paper (5 carbons), where the top copy was printed from the ink ribbon, and the remaining 5 copies via the carbon layers.

The three tape drives in the picture are of two different models. The outside two, with the diagonal vacuum columns, were 800/1600 BPI. We had those when I first began work there. The single drive in the middle, is a 800/1600/6250 BPI model. Cosmicray (talk) 20:48, 13 August 2021 (UTC)