I don't
know the 9144 number. If that's a QIC drive,
It is, and it isn't :-). The
tapes are the same physical dimensions
as, say, a DC300 cartridge, but the format is not one of the QIC
formats. In fact the tapes are pre-formatted by HP and can't be
reformatted by the drive.
I went and dug up my hp300 stuff. Turns out I have a 9144. There's
even a tape in it, though it's reasonably likely it's a vanilla QIC
tape I was trying to test the drive with, not realizing it's not
compatible with the rest of the QIC universe.
I don't know whether it's succumbed to the roller-turns-to-goo issue.
If the tapes to be read are near enough Montreal for it to matter, I
could check, and try to set up an HP-IB-capable host to speak to the
drive. This would not be easy, as my biggest hp300 machine has all of
5M of RAM and my only working HP-IB disk last I checked weighed about
what I do, pulls something like 7A of mains current idling (about 11A
briefly during startup), and is about half a gig. I have a card that
looks like an HP-IB card (probably actually the IEEE HP-IB-alike,
IEEE488 I think it is) for my SBus machines, but I have zero
documentation on how to speak to a device with it.
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