Today's Exciting Acquisition & Microvax 3100 Question

The TZ30 is compatible with the TK50. There are also SCSI TK50 drives, but they are full-height. I never got around to using a TZ30, even though there are a couple around at work. We just don't have anything on TK50-formatted tapes. I went from a TK50 to a TK70 to an Exabyte 8200 to a TLZ04 to a DLT4000, so I don't know how the TZ30 is in terms of speed and reliability compared to a TK50. I remember going through a few TK50 drives, most of which where due to people abusing the drives. The 8200 drive seemed to wear out about every six months, even with proper cleaning. I never had a problem with my TLZ04 or my DLT4000. At work we have TZ867 and TZ877 drives, and it seems we have about one replaced every three months, but they get a LOT of use, and if we have any glitches that can't be explained on a bad tape or operator error the drive gets replaced. If the TZ30 is anything like the TK50 I'd limit using it to just reading existing TK50-formatted tapes and get a cheap TLZ04 or TLZ06 from eBay for backups. The OpenVMS Hobbyist program is free. The Tru64 Enthusiast program costs $100. I have one VAX system (and one Charon-VAX emulator) and three Alphas running VMS and one Alpha running Tru64 V5.1. I only have the Alpha running Tru64 for keeping up with Tru64. I really prefer VMS. Horrible default operating system? Hah! A VAX should only run VMS or, if necessary, VAXELN. [warning, topic drift ahead!] I haven't had to deal with ELN for a couple of years now. I never got deep into ELN on purpose, but where I used to work we had a Schlumberger S90 memory tester that was MVII-based running an old version of ELN. We were having performance problems getting some vectors generated quickly during test (the parts were taking several minutes to test) so it was decided to try to port the software to a new version of ELN so it would run on a VAX 4000-105A with a QBUS adapter. Unfortunately, I only had a month to get the port working and it took a long time to just get the sofware modified to compile with the new version. I ran out of time to get any timing problems fixed as I could only have the tester at limited times to debug. Rather than go ahead and buy the 4000 management decreed we return the demo unit. The manager acted like any money spent in the department came out of his personal bank account. He used to gloat about how he was the only manager that always had a surplus in the budget every year, while those of us working in the department had to deal with obsolete equipment and limited supplies. If the porting project would have been impossible due to the timing issues we still would have had a huge performance increase over our host MV3900. On the 3900 compiling the S90 test programs (written in VAXELN Pascal) took about 15 minutes. On the 4000 the time went down to about 2 minutes. -- Eric Dittman dittman(a)dittman.net