On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 11:15 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
Does anyone have a loose 3M/Georgens MCD-405 tape
drive they could take
board pictures
and firmware dumps from, or any of the other MCD-40 series tape drives?
I'm trying to
figure out how similar it is to the one in the Apple 40mb tape drive.
I believe I have one in my XL1200, I will check tonight.
- Josh
I was asked about recovering some tapes from a Supermac 40mb tape/disk
scsi box, and I
am trying to figure out what tape drive I might need to do it. It appears
it is Gammamat
format, which would work with the Apple drives, and I wanted to compare
the firmware from
a non-Apple, so I started looking around for SCSI Gammamat drives. I also
thought this
would be useful knowledge for anyone trying to dump Symbolics XL-Series
DC2040 tapes.
One interesting thing mentioned in the Amiga BTNTape tape handler was they
mention it was
possible on some MCD series drives to format a blank DC2000 tape. They
mention formatting
with 2:1 interleave.
Sadly, there were also people who said there was a tech manual available
from Georgens on
the series, but they didn't want to spend $50 for it. Georgens Industries
was in San Diego
and there still a few traces of them, but they are long gone at their last
adr. I see that
Chuck mentioned they were into the maintenance biz, Georgens was involved
with DEI down there
looking at his patents, and bought 3M's streamer tape line.
Places like Weird Stuff have piles of the DC2000 floppy tape drives, need
to do more digging
to see if there are any SCSI ones around.
Then, I have to redo the pinch roller. All the Apple tape drives have been
dead for over ten
years with rollers turned to orange goo.