Upgrading early BIOS

Chuck> On 14 Aug 2008 at 12:36, Jules Richardson wrote: Chuck> ... Chuck> If disks were bad, tapes were far worse. There was all manner Chuck> of mutually-incompatible cheap tape backup out there. We Chuck> insisted as SCSI being the only tape interface that we would Chuck> support--there was an ANSI-defined common command set and most Chuck> of the later units were read-after-write verification. I Chuck> wonder how many of those old DC2000 carts written on Chuck> floppytape drives are still readable? And who can still read Chuck> their Datasonix Pereos tapes? (I've got some Irwin- recorded Chuck> DC1000s that I really should check for readability one of Chuck> these days). Sure, but SCSI didn't necessarily cure these issues. I still have a 4mm DAT drive from Colorado Memories (or some name like that -- acquired by HP years ago). If I remember right it comes with a SCSI controller, and it works with that controller -- but not with any other SCSI controller. And it requires proprietary software that was promptly discontinued by HP. I can still use that drive but only because I still have the Win95 system that can support the software, and the floppies it came on. Even the mainframe world isn't that painful -- at least not where 1/2 inch tapes are concerned. 7 track is more difficult, and I wouldn't want to imagine the pain involved in reading 1 inch 14 track tapes (CDC early 1960s) never mind even more ancient stuff like Uniservo tapes... paul