On 03/12/2017 04:56 PM, Systems Glitch via cctech wrote: What makes them hard to come by is that they must be preformatted for the TU58, as far as I know only DEC had hardware to do that. The Drive as it stands cannot do that, It is not capable of higher storage capacity as a result (hardware limit, programming and no formatting). I run RT-11XM using TU58 a real one. Boot times to load the RT-11XM: driver and copy the tape and boot to XM: virtual disk that takes about 5 minutes. That's with the files optimally placed on the tape (in order of need) to limit the number of rewinds. The VAX750 used TU58 to load microcode and diagnostics. Any os that can fit on the 256K per tape times two tapes would likely be bootable if it can do the serial protocal used for the booter and the OS. A PC emulation (or Rpi) can do this a bit faster (just over a minute for a boot can copy to VM:) but you are limited to the max baud rate (38K) of the serial port use by the DD driver. There was at least one company that used a floppy drive (360K 5.25 or 720K for two sided) with a TU58 emulation that was somewhat faster than tape due to faster seeks to a block. Allison