Advice for tape drive repair / maintenance

Actually, I suspect you can, but you just don't know where/how. That is, I would say the difference is that then, the good stuff was still available in mass-market shops (even if only higher-end ones); now, it's harder to find than that. As an exmaple, I relatively recently (sometime around '00, I think) saw a computer that as far as software went was a bog-standard peecee, but was built, mechanically, kind of like those old black rotary-dial phones from the pre-breakup Bell System, the ones you can stand in boiling water overnight and drop ten feet onto concrete and the worst that'll happen is you'll chip the casing: it used a heavy grade of sheet steel - it could probably take a person standing on it in any orientation - and everything was braced six ways from Sunday. It actually looked as though it were targeted at a remote installation, the sort of thing where it costs so much to send someone out to fix it that an extra $5000 on the sticker price is ignorable. I don't know (and don't think I want to know) what it cost, but it was *beautifully* built. This is relevant because I've seen only one such, and have never seen one for sale anywhere - if I'd not chanced to see that one, I'd have no reason to think such a thing exists as a commercial product. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B