27 Aug
2015
27 Aug
'15
9:46 p.m.
I can confirm that back in the day (has that been 25 years ago now?) I was
able to read a couple of TK-50's I'd made in school with a TK-70 that I had
access to through a friend's work.
Mind you, even new the TK-50 was a woe-be-gotten piece-of-xxxxx that worked
right about as often as the Cubs win the World Series. I can't imagine the
pain and suffering that you'd go through today to read one.
But good luck! Maybe I just had a run of bad luck with them...
Warner
On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 10:39 PM, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, TK70 drive can read but not
write TK50 tapes.
I have very limited experience with this family of drives so far, but what
little I have is not good. Pictures:
https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/617511461452013568
https://twitter.com/nf6x/status/617519989721923584
Maybe my tapes need baking or something to keep the oxide from shedding? I
haven't tried it yet. Unfortunately, my failure mode results in a
labor-intensive fiddly manual tape extraction job followed by manually
rewinding tapes into cartridges designed to make it very difficult to do
anything manually, so I haven't found the motivation to resume
experimenting yet. If and when I resume experimenting, I might look into
making some sort of gizmo to let me unlock the two cartridge spool locks
and then manually rewind the tape, without needing to disassemble the
cartridge with springs popping out all over the place. Maybe something 3D
printed the depresses the latches, with a crank that engages the spool?
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/