Tape Drives Used as Random Access Devices Through Mid-70’s

Following our article, First Computer Tape Drive Originated From Remington Rand, we received this email from Juan A. Rodriguez, a pioneer in the development of tape technologies across four decades, co-founder of StorageTek in 1969, Exabyte in 1985, Ecrix in 1996, and a professor in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado.

I certainly disagree that "Four years later IBM announced the first HDD, the Ramac 350, for primary storage, tapes then being used as backup media only."

The terms used during this time frame have been: sort, secondary storage, backup and archive. Sorts where done on tape through the early eighties ending with the advent of the vacuum-column-less tape drives in 1984. I believe that the trend for tapes being for backup only started in the late 90’s. Even today the large and ever increasing data amount stored on-line on tape libraries belies the term "as backup media only".