Advice for tape drive repair / maintenance

I think that is the main diffeence. I am happy to accept minor failures going for as long as I want to use it. Well, PICs seem to be pretty well docuemted, and I quite like thoes, ditto other microcontrollers. But I used FPGAs in a previous job (Xilinx 3000 series, which were current at the time), and hated evey minute of it. Not really becuase of lack of docuemtnation (although that meant I couldn't cure some of the problems I faced), but becasue the software was kludgy, slow (on what was then a fast PC), produced unhelpful reports about what it had done to my design, thogut it could design better than I could, had a simulator that failed to find glitches where they did occur and fond them where they couldn't possibly occur (like on the output of D-types well away from clock edges), and so on... Do we>? About the only thin I dislike is archiving stuff in a proprietry format. Not because I can't (easliy) make use of it, but because the whole point of archiving is to preserve stuff for the future, and you can't be sure the machine to run tht proprietry program will exist, even as an emulator. But I certainly regard sites like bitsavers and hpmuseum.net as a terrific resource. Yes, it's inconvnient for me to make use of them, but that's my fault, not the site's. I don't own a scanner, so I can't contribute as much as I'd like, but if you look at the latter site you'll see several files of the form 'FooScheamticsByTonyDuell'. No, I didn't scan them, but I sure did draw them out, and I did give permisison for them to be distributed. -tony