13 Feb
2020
13 Feb
'20
4:55 p.m.
On Feb 13, 2020, at 7:35 PM, Timothe Litt <litt at
ieee.org> wrote:
...
Someone wrote a DECtape driver for VAX - I think Stan R., though it wasn't supported.
DECtape controllers are odd devices - the TD10 is reasonably smart, but the others put
realtime constraints on the drivers that could be hard to meet. Anyhow, by the time the
VAX came out, TU58 and Floppies were cheaper and denser media.
TU58, denser perhaps, but vastly less reliable and utterly despised by pretty much
everyone at DEC. Also very much slower.
I heard that the VMS DECtape driver was by Andy Goldstein. The report also mentioned that
it supposedly did "overlapped seek", just as the TOPS-10 driver does, but unlike
PDP-11 DECtape drivers. I never saw a system that actually had one, unfortunately.
paul