That "famous" QIC tape unit.... ...has been talked about a lot, still some things are still not clear to me.
Baking : is this a last-resort means of reading some valuable tape, or a means to restore them for a further few years of usage ? I intend to bake mine before usage, although a few unused, still shrinkwrapped, tapes seem to be in excellent condition, including tensioning belt. Those I might try without baking. The belt : is the elastibands method usable for more than a few reads/writes, or is robbing belts from 6150's really the only way ? Belts seem to come in 2 guises : black belts, often dead and somewhat sticking to the magtape itself, and smaller white belts, always broken, and bonded firmly to the magnetic coating. Sadly all my Tek Library and Test tapes are of the latter variant. Al is maintaining a set of ROM images for these machines, are tape images covered somewhere ? Do we have an fixed tape image format, as has been done with Dave's IMD for floppies ? Background : currently in the process of restoring both my 4052's. Have the maintenance manual and spares, so there is hope. But ideally I would also like to keep using the cartidge drive. Fool's errant or workable option ? Jos
