QIC02

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 09:02 pm, Chuck Guzis wrote: I have a QIC02 drive here that I got going under linux, figure out how to talk to it, assess its capabilities, and got to understand tar more than I'd really wanted to... I wrote a bit of data to a tape, read it back, and that was that. The thing uses a proprietary interface 8-bit card, which limits my choices when it comes to interrupts and DMA and such, which is why I eventually took it out of the box it was in. It's still sitting around here somewhere. I have an assortment of different tapes in the form factor this thing will talk to, I think the biggest ones were capable of holding 256MB (not considering compression). This hardly seemed to be worthwhile bothering with, overall. I think my biggest disappointment was that you couldn't use compression with tar and also span tapes at the same time. The thing was a bit noisy, but not nearly as bad as those floppy-tape drives with their high-pitched whine that drove me nuts some years earlier. Oh, and all of this was done under linux, back around the time I started messing with it, 1999 or 2000 or somewhere around there, probably Slackware 4.0, for whatever that's worth. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin