DECassette questions

On Thu, 25 Aug 2005 16:16:44, Joe R. <rigdonj at cfl.rr.com> wrote: Hmm... are you _sure_ about that? The TU80 is a 42"-tall cab with a flat mount (reels point at ceiling) 1600 bpi 9-track tape drive with a pair of 50-pin formatted interface cables. DEC made an interface for it, and it's compatible with several 3rd-party interface boards (Dilog, et al.) Perhaps you have a TU60? Audio cassette-sized cassettes, but with a 2mm notch in the middle of the top - data-grade only, not Radio Shack cheapies. No. I have one (with a Unibus interface), but I've never powered it up. You are looking for a TA8E card. Not sure about the handle number. What I have is an industry-standard data cassette - they look almost exactly like home audio cassettes except for the 2mm notch in the top middle of the case, and they typically have red or white plastic flaps rather than bust-out-tabs for write protect - i.e. you can write-enable a tape by flipping the flap over the hole again. I suppose it would be somewhat easy to mod an ordinary cassette to work in these, but I suspect that you might run into a long-term reliability problem. IIRC, the data cassettes used a thicker mylar that would stand up to heavy use. I certainly wouldn't bother modding a C90 - we never used those for PET use back in the day - too thin and fragile. I'd start with a C20 or C30 and go from there, possibly as high as a C60. They aren't block structured as far as I know - more like traditional magtape. You should be able to boot from them, but I think in terms of writing, you can only overwrite swaths of tape, not parts of files. -ethan