RAISING RELIABILITY OF MAGNETIC TAPE STORAGE BY PROGRAMMED ORGANIZATION OF INFORMATION RETRIEVAL IN TAPE SECTIONS,

One of the principle trends in raising magnetic-tape storage reliability is considered, i.e., organizing the operation of magnetic tapes so that when tape sections fail a specially designed program will on readout correct the errors and renew the record in the section, or select a new section from among the reserves and record the corrected information in it. Organizing the restoration of tape sections in connection with correcting codes or another type of redundancy reduces at least to some degree the number of failures in magnetic tape memories in comparison with the use of correcting codes alone. There are no serious difficulties in the way of this method. The main complication is introducing redundancy into the information and constructing the correcting code. The program operates for a relatively short period during failures and corresponds to several repeated accesses to the tape. Algorithms are given for recording on tape and for readout. Author