Obviously for the auto-loading drives, either would be
bad news. But
it's for the last reason that I'm interested in the blue (well,
sometimes white) tape.
Or yellow.
I'd like a source of these too. Foam blocks were ok back then, but it
seems like it's hard to guess which type will not go to crumbs or goo.
I would also like to find a few of the rings that prevented insertion of
a write-enable ring. These seem to have been uncommon. We were a CDC
site at the time, dunno if that's a selector.
De