On Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:30:38 -0800 "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Yes. Back in my Linux days I used it. Sometimes it worked, most time it didn't. If you looked to close at the drive the driver got confused and you had to reboot to get it working again. I suspect bit rot made tpqic02 completely unusable meanwhile. NetBSD had no problems with QIC-02 / QIC-36 drives. See http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?wt+4+NetBSD-current -- tsch??, Jochen Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 09:02 pm, Chuck Guzis wrote: I have a QIC02 drive here that I got going under linux, figure out how to talk to it, assess its capabilities, and got to understand tar more than I'd really wanted to... I wrote a bit of data to a tape, read it back, and that was that. The thing uses a proprietary interface 8-bit card, which limits my choices when it comes to interrupts and DMA and such, which is why I eventually took it out of the box it was in. It's still sitting around here somewhere. I have an assortment of different tapes in the form factor this thing will talk to, I think the biggest ones were capable of holding 256MB (not considering compression). This hardly seemed to be worthwhile bothering with, overall. I think my biggest disappointment was that you couldn't use compression with tar and also span tapes at the same time. The thing was a bit noisy, but not nearly as bad as those floppy-tape drives with their high-pitched whine that drove me nuts some years earlier. Oh, and all of this was done under linux, back around the time I started messing with it, 1999 or 2000 or somewhere around there, probably Slackware 4.0, for whatever that's worth. -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin