kryoflux

Al Kossow aek at bitsavers.org
Sun Jul 3 11:12:16 CDT 2016



On 7/2/16 11:54 AM, Jay West wrote:

> Kryoflux’s next project should be the same thing but for ½ mag tape.

What tape drive?

You'd either have to pick one old enough that they still had separate formatters,
or have mods to pick off the data before the decoders. There is also the problem
of direct control of the transport.

Qualstar 105x would probably be the one i'd try, since it is still sort of common,
and not insanely expensive to still buy used, is pretty simple, I have a couple
of dozen of them, and I've modded one where I've mounted a 7-track head.

This is also needed for 4-track fixed-head 1/4" tapes. I have a couple of old
Kennedy drives that I was just thinking about modding to read all 4 tracks in
parallel. Then, it's just a forward and backwards pass over the tape, the same
as you do on 1/2".

I have a huge backlog of tape at CHM, so this is pretty high on my list to get done
this year.



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