31 Dec
2007
31 Dec
'07
4:38 p.m.
On Saturday 29 December 2007 07:25, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
--snip--
Ah, that's a shame.
I think of it as an "opportunity" ;-)
Now if I can only find time to work on it....
Your welcome!
Lyle
--
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
Mountain View, CA
http://bickleywest.com
"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"
What's installed in your machine? How many ports? Ethernet?
The poor critter, it's documentation and log are stashed behind an
SGI Onyx IR in my internal storage area. I can see it - but not its
backside. IIRC, It has six ports, 170MB HDD, DAT tape (and VHS
port) - but no ethernet :-(
--snip--
When you say "new VHS player" are you using
the AM's VCR equipment
NOS, or just an off-the-shelf one?
Off the shelf. It would have been nice to have AM's VCR - but the
off-the-shelf worked fine (just a bit more "operator" interaction
required).
I remember the system administrator at the Salvation
Army telling
me that they backed up to VHS (in retrospect I think they were
using either AM-20XX or AM-3000 units at the individual
corps/churches) and being incredulous, that it had to be some
other form of magtape.
As you know, the VHS backup is actually quite reliable - because
there are multiple redundant copies of all records (quantity user
controlled). This is a critical feature since a VHS player can't
stop, backspace record and re-read like a "real" tape backup.
What is really "strange" is that one can duplicate AMOS backup VHS
tapes using two standard VHS units (1 read and 1 record) - and the
duplicated tape will be readable by AMOS.
I'm getting questions now and then about what
hardware people need
to find to restore from an AM tape, like the old PC and Mac-based
VideoTRAX system, so I should probably do a page on that.
Good idea...
Also, I recently acquired an AM-1200, and there will
be a
model page for that as soon as I get it operational.
I also have a nice AM-1042 that is anxiously awaiting
restoration. It's clean (came from a dentist's office), I've
tested the PS, but it's currently not bootable. If any of the
folks on this list are not familiar with Alpha
Micro, do yourself a favor and check out Cameron's website!!
Thank you for the kind word :)