9 Track Tape Drive Interface Variants

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:47:20 -0400 Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Yes. But a bad trade. I traded some Transputer stuff for the /34. The former owner of the /34 is a Transputer-fanatic. He has several Transputer systems running. So I gave ihm some of that Transputer stuff I found in a dumpster diving session recently. I couldn't use the Transputers due to a missing host interface. He is verry happy with that Transputer stuff and actually uses it. He didn't do anything with the PDP-11 in maybe about 20 years. So he was glad to give the /34 to a DECadent person like me. The bad thing on the trade: The /34 is a rack full of heavy machinery. The Transputers are only a few, samll PCBs. Due to a herniated intervertebral disk, that caused a partial paralysis of my right leg, I am no longer able to lift stuff like a RK05, not to think about a BA11-K with that big mains transformer in the back. It was - literally - a pain in the back for me to get this stuff into my flat, even with the help of a friend. Getting this stuff into the rack will be "interresting". Most likely I'll have to build some kind of a small crane... In theory yes. In practice no. I just don't want it. It is big. It is heavy. I don't need it. Moving the rest of the /34 was more then enough for me for quite some time. I don't have any 800 BPI tapes to read. I even don't have the space for it. The /34 takes up my entire hallway at the moment. (The rest of my flat is already filled to the ceiling with all sorts of computing machinery and large format cameras, darkroom, ...) The tape drive will go to ePay. Some other person will take care of it. It won't be my problem and I am glad about that. More motivation to get a different controller with a formated Pertec interface to fit my nice and (relatively) small Cipher 880. :-) And there is still an other option: Slaughter the TC-130 for the UniBus interface chips. Interface some modernish microcontroler to the UniBus and build my own tape (or whatever) controller. ;-) -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}