Nine track tape BOT sensing foil

On 1 Mar 2007 at 5:30, Mr Ian Primus wrote: It's still available, but you have a look a bit. See, for example: http://www.datalinksales.com/cgi- bin/shop/datstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=011%20001000 Most of the audio sensing tape that I see emphasizes its conductive aspect, while the stuff used for 1/2" tape is used as a reflective medium. While the audio tape stuff might work, I'm not certain. In the bad old days, it was not uncommon for a boot tape to turn up with an error when you least needed it--or for you to have forgotten to bring the boot tape for the system you needed to start--say, for a system with a different configuration. The practice then was to separate varioius boot records with BOT markers--so you could simply hit LOAD and the drive would space forward to the next load point. Probably one of the oldest "boot manager" systems. Invaluable if you were out in the field a couple of thousand miles from home. I don't know if this will work with all of the autoloading drives, but it certainly worked just fine on the floor-standing vacuum-column units. But then, this was when you could take a large Samsonite case full of tape as carry-on luggage and not have to worry about being strip-searched. Cheers, Chuck