54 TK50 tapes on eBay

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-05-17 21:54, Mark J. Blair wrote:
>
>> On May 17, 2015, at 12:50, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On May 17, 2015, at 12:41, Robert Jarratt <robert.jarratt at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Glad you got the board and I hope you get a decent drive to read the tapes
>>> with. You could always put together a Qbus system just to read the tapes
>>> (which could then be the much better TK70, or even some of the later
>>> drives), but if you have a 730 and can read it there that would be great. I
>>> used to use a 730 many years ago, would be great to see one again.
>
> Ah, this brings up another question: Would I be able to dump VMS TK50 tapes to image files somehow under RT11? Once I have my PDP-11/03 working reliably with a SCSI card and SCSI2SD or something similar, maybe that would be a more convenient system for imaging the tapes, assuming RT11 can do what's necessary.

Sure. Reading the tape is simple. And then you have the tape blocks. The 
question is what you do with them from there...

You might want to try and find some tool that creates some tape image. 
Under RSX you'd normally use TPC, which creates file images of the tape, 
which the same tool can then recreate the tapes from. The format would 
be familiar to anyone who dealt with TPC-format tapes under Unix. ;-)

	Johnny