> On Feb 13, 2020, at 7:35 PM, Timothe Litt <l...@ieee.org> wrote:
>
> ...
> Someone wrote a DECtape driver for VAX - I think Stan R., though it wasn't
> supported. DECtape controllers are odd devices - the TD10 is reasonably
> smart, but the others put realtime constraints on the drivers that could be
> hard to meet. Anyhow, by the time the VAX came out, TU58 and Floppies were
> cheaper and denser media.
TU58, denser perhaps, but vastly less reliable and utterly despised by pretty
much everyone at DEC. Also very much slower.
I heard that the VMS DECtape driver was by Andy Goldstein. The report also
mentioned that it supposedly did "overlapped seek", just as the TOPS-10 driver
does, but unlike PDP-11 DECtape drivers. I never saw a system that actually
had one, unfortunately.
paul
