On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 11:15 AM, Al Kossow <a...@bitsavers.org> wrote:
> Does anyone have a loose 3M/Georgens MCD-405 tape drive they could take > board pictures > and firmware dumps from, or any of the other MCD-40 series tape drives? > I'm trying to > figure out how similar it is to the one in the Apple 40mb tape drive. > I believe I have one in my XL1200, I will check tonight. - Josh > > I was asked about recovering some tapes from a Supermac 40mb tape/disk > scsi box, and I > am trying to figure out what tape drive I might need to do it. It appears > it is Gammamat > format, which would work with the Apple drives, and I wanted to compare > the firmware from > a non-Apple, so I started looking around for SCSI Gammamat drives. I also > thought this > would be useful knowledge for anyone trying to dump Symbolics XL-Series > DC2040 tapes. > > One interesting thing mentioned in the Amiga BTNTape tape handler was they > mention it was > possible on some MCD series drives to format a blank DC2000 tape. They > mention formatting > with 2:1 interleave. > > Sadly, there were also people who said there was a tech manual available > from Georgens on > the series, but they didn't want to spend $50 for it. Georgens Industries > was in San Diego > and there still a few traces of them, but they are long gone at their last > adr. I see that > Chuck mentioned they were into the maintenance biz, Georgens was involved > with DEI down there > looking at his patents, and bought 3M's streamer tape line. > > Places like Weird Stuff have piles of the DC2000 floppy tape drives, need > to do more digging > to see if there are any SCSI ones around. > > Then, I have to redo the pinch roller. All the Apple tape drives have been > dead for over ten > years with rollers turned to orange goo. > > >
