New subject: 9-track tape drive: What is this?

19 Aug 1997

Tony Duell &lt;ard(a)odin.phy.bris.ac.uk&gt; wrote:
...
   Sounds like
HP-IB all right.  Note that not all 7970s are.  
 It's a fairly safe bet IMHO that anything HP after about 1975 with that
 connector is HPIB. There are probably exceptions, but I've not come across
 many (any?) 
Any time I've seen that connector on HP gear it was for HP-IB.  And
the 7970s that aren't HP-IB don't have that connector.  Instead I
think they have a card-edge connector or something to mate with a
card-edge connector (on the end of a long cable that you're supposed
to drag back to the interface in the CPU cabinet).

The 7970 is not a new drive; HP made and sold them for a number of
years.  The first HP 3000 I ever saw (a series II) had one, and that
was in 1977.  I'm pretty sure there was some way to hook it up to a
2100 (stand-alone, or in an instrument controller or 1000/2000
configuration) as well.

The HP 3000 series II and series III did not use HP-IB.  The first
HP-IB 3000s were the series 30 and 33.  When HP started shipping new
HP-IB peripherals that were bigger/better/faster[1] they also had the
"Starfish" for the series III.  That was a small card cage mounted in
its own 19" cabinet, reportedly due to UL certification requirements,
which provided a GIC (General I/O Channel aka HP-IB interface) and
somehow interfaced it to the series III.

At a previous place of employment, we had a series III when I started.
It eventually (1984) got upgraded to (box swapped for) a series 64,
which supported HP-IB somewhat more directly.  We had had a Starfish
on the III, but had only used it for a 7933 disc -- the 7970E tape
drives were hooked up to a MAGNETIC TAPE INTERFACE card in the III.
Part of the upgrade was the removal of some interface electronics from
the bottom of the "master" 7970E and its replacement with some new
interface electronics that spoke HP-IB.  There was a similar
replacement for the 7925 disc drive too.

...
  BTW, what's the correct name for that series of
connectors? We tend to
 call them 'Amphenol Connectors' in the UK (while realising that Amphenol
 make a wide range of different connectors). I've also seen them called
 'Centronics Connectors' (after the common use for the 36 pin one I guess),
 IEEE (or IEEE-488) connectors (after the common use for the 24 pin one)
 and 'Telco Connectors'. I think the last is what HP call them. 
Doggone if I know.  We always called them HP-IB connectors.  So did
the HP CEs.  We were pretty much a 3000 shop with not much non-HP
equipment outside of the modems and furniture, certainly nothing else
that tried to use that connector.  Well, we did for a while have a
Univac 1004 RJE station, but we never tried to plug it into the 3000
and I can't remember ever trying to do much with it other than feed it
paper when it ran out.

-Frank McConnell

[1] the ones I am thinking of are the 7933 disc drive (404MB washing
    machine), 7976A tape drive (6250BPI 9-track, streaming and
    start-stop, OEM'd from someone else (STC I think)), and 2680A laser
    printer; I think these were the only peripherals supported for
    connection via Starfish