> Well, as others have pointed out, a "tape transport" is not the whole > ball-of-wax. You need the ability to format the tape into blocks and then > control tape motion in terms of those blocks. That's what you'd be > responsible for in your added electronics. From the Introduction in the > Kennedy manual:> > "The Model 9800 is equipped with the electronics > necessary for reading and writing tapes and for > controlling the tape motion. The head specifications > and the mechanical and electrical tolerances of the > Model 9800 meet the requirements for IBM compatibility. > > However, the formatting electronics, parity > generator, cyclic redundancy check character (CRCC) > generator, gap control, etc, are not included and > must be provided by the tape control and formatter > in order to generate properly formatted IBM compatible > tapes."
Yes, you will need the controller to at least format, but not sure about just reading/writing. Earlier this year I lucked onto a pair of Kennedy 9000 drives from a listmember here in Oz. These are similar in physical size and arrangement to the HP 97970 rather than the more compact 9800 on eBay. Not long after, I found a Kennedy 9219 Format Control Unit formatter in the US which I shipped to Oz. I also acquired an Emulex TC11 unibus controller and an Emulex TC03 Qbus controller but have not been able to find the split ribbon cable yet. However I think this is the standard Pertec interface cable, so I will be posting the boards to this listmember for testing sometime in the near future to find out whether the whole box and dice will actually work together, at least for one of the controllers. I bought some 36-pin edge connectors in anticipation of making up my own split cable based on the listmember's cable. It's going to be a long while before I can report anything, but whatever happens I'll at least be making some notes about it. Steve.
