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AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsWayne T. Comeaux, David C. Graves, Douglas W. Johnson
Estimating the term…
A magnetic tape has three evenly spaced-apart longitudinally-extending servo track areas. Four equal-sized longitudinally-extending data track areas are disposed between said servo track areas and between longitudinal edges of the tape and one of said longitudinally-extending data track areas. For track following, all servo track areas are simultaneously sensed for producing one head positioning signal. Data tracks are arranged into four groups of tracks, one-half of the data tracks in each group are concurrently accessed. The data tracks on the tape are arranged in clusters. Each cluster has one track from each of the groups of tracks. Two laterally-adjacent track clusters constitute four data track wraps for serpentine scanning of data tracks. The concurrent track accessing respectively occurs in first and second halves of a data track wrap (there is a number of wraps equal to one half the number of track clusters). Each servo area indicates two lateral positions of the tape to the head. The lateral spacing between the lateral positions is equal to about a data track width. This arrangement makes the servo areas field writable. The magnetic head has a number of data write and read gaps equal to the number of clusters. A set of four servo gaps are interposed between four groups of write and read gaps and positioned to simultaneously sense all three servo track areas.
An elongated flexible magnetic tape record member having a magnetic coating for receiving and storing signals, a pair of longitudinal edges, a lateral direction of said magnetic tape being transverse to said longitudinal edges, the improvement including, in combination:
A method of controlling a lateral position of a
A magnetic tape drive having means for transporting a magnetic tape between first and second tape reels past a transducing station in the tape drive, said tape and a multi-gap multi-track head mounted in the tape drive in said transducing station for relative lateral movements for enabling said head to concurrently access data tracks on the magnetic tape in each of a predetermined number of groups of laterally spaced-apart ones said data tracks, an improvement including, in combination:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.