[Simh] Various

[Paul Koning]

> On Feb 13, 2020, at 7:35 PM, Timothe Litt <litt at ieee.org> wrote:
> 
> ...
> Someone wrote a DECtape driver for VAX - I think Stan R., though it wasn't supported.  DECtape controllers are odd devices - the TD10 is reasonably smart, but the others put realtime constraints on the drivers that could be hard to meet.  Anyhow, by the time the VAX came out, TU58 and Floppies were cheaper and denser media.

TU58, denser perhaps, but vastly less reliable and utterly despised by pretty much everyone at DEC.  Also very much slower.

I heard that the VMS DECtape driver was by Andy Goldstein.  The report also mentioned that it supposedly did "overlapped seek", just as the TOPS-10 driver does, but unlike PDP-11 DECtape drivers.  I never saw a system that actually had one, unfortunately.

	paul