The IBM 7701 Magnetic Tape Transmission Terminal was a communications device announced by
IBM in 1960. It was designed to transfer the contents of a reel of
magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magne ...
over a leased or dial telephone circuit.
The IBM 7702 was a similar device that could communicate at higher speeds.
The 7701 was the first product introduced in conjunction with IBM's ''TELE-PROCESSING'' trademark.
Technical details
The 7701 communicated using the
Synchronous transmit-receive
Synchronous transmit-receive (STR) was an early IBM character-oriented communications protocol which preceded Bisync. STR was point-to-point only, and employed a ''four-of-eight'' transmission code, communicating at up to 5100 characters per sec ...
(STR) communications protocol over either private or switched (''message service'') telephone lines. It operated at speeds of either 75 or 150 characters per second (cps). The 7702 operated at speeds of either 150, 250, or 300 characters per second.
The devices used a special ''incremental'' magnetic tape drive that was controlled by the STR communications unit. The drive used standard one half inch, seven track magnetic tape reels recorded at 200 bytes per inch (BPI). It moved the tape on demand in increments of and was capable of reading data under the read/write head even when the tape was stationary. Either binary or
BCD tapes could be processed.
The 7701 could communicate with a remote computer system or with another 7701 or 7702.
Dimensions
The 7701 was high, wide, and deep.
References
7701
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