I've turned over the contact info to the three people who were interested in these Sun systems. What I really wanted to find was a tabletop SCSI 9-track. By fortuitous circumstance, I checked eBay past auctions and among the very few auctions was a guy 45 minutes away unsuccessfully selling a few, so yesterday I picked up three units yesterday for $250. For this to happen in SE Wisconsin and not Silicon Valley was clear evidence of my clean living and resulting good karma. Two HP 88780B and one slimmer Overland Data. The HPs are nice, heavy engineering and all three appear to be in good shape. If anyone wants one, I probably only need to keep one after I finish a data conversion project for a client. The client's data is circa 1992. A nearby data-entry place was still using 9-tracks for long-term storage. They'd enter the data on PCs and write to table-top units. They junked the last of their drives a few years ago. The tape drives I bought were pulled from active service in the ink jet printing industry, the seller explained. "Ink jet" as in addressing junk mail, for example. They were connected to VME-based rack-mount systems that read the tapes and drove the printers on the shop floor. So like paper tape and CNC, it seems that 9-tracks are still in use out there. Not all had switched to other storage methods. - John