FACOM 618 Magnetic Tape Unit

Tape speed for this equipment was 125inch/s, but in the following year (1977), Fujitsu completed their top-performing FACOM 613A which increased tape speed to 200inch/s and achieved a data transfer speed capacity of 1.25Mbyte/s. Also in 1981, Fujitsu completed the compact, inexpensive FACOM 617 and FACOM 618 which had a new operation mode called "streaming mode" suitable for backing up magnetic disks. Data transfer speed of the FACOM 618 in streaming mode was 1.25Mbyte/s—the same performance as the FACOM 613A which had the highest performance at the time—but setup area was reduced to 60% of that of the FACOM 613A. In 1986, Fujitsu completed the FACOM 619 which, even in normal mode, achieved a transfer speed of 1.25Mbyte/s (the same as the FACOM 613A) even though the unit was the same size as the FACOM 618.