Tape cleaner on eBay

[Glen Slick]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 12:46 PM, Brent Hilpert <hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
>
> I have an HP 7970A - 9-track, 800BPI - with my HP 2116. I wrote monitor commands to exercise it and do tape dumps from it.
>
> They're uncommon compared to 1600 & > BPI  drives, figured that was because the 800 standard was older and saw a shorter life before being superseded, but are such drives that rare or hard to come by?
>
> (I rather wished it was 1600 so I could read more-common tapes.)

I have an 800BPI 7970B in a 2113B rack system. I've never gotten
around to trying to get it up and running. Are they fairly reliable
drives to get going again? I don't have any other 800BPI drives to
write any tapes to read with it.