23 Jun
2005
23 Jun
'05
11:19 a.m.
I still have a bottle of it but what good would it
do to know the binary
pattern? You couldn't program a new tape with it.
Maybe not with the standard HP controller , but you could, surely, send
pulses with the right spacing to a tape drive to recreate the pattern on
a new tape.
[1] Although I think you could with an HP9877 or a 9825 running special
software, since those controllers are very dumb devices, they don't even
do any form of serial-parallel conversion. I am not so sure about the
9845 controller, it's got an HP custom bybrid in the middle with 64 pins.
Many of them go straight to the I/O bus, the rest go to the tape drive,
amplified read signal, etc. All the interesting stuff is inside that
hybrid...
-tony