What memories that brings back. I worked in chatsworth at Pertec on them tape drives as a Tech on the assembly line. they were a pain in the butt to make work perfectly. Glad them tape drive days are over.
On 6/10/2015 12:34 AM, Mark J. Blair wrote: > I was looking at a couple of documents describing the Pertec tape interface; > the manual for my Kennedy 9610 tape drive, and a nice reference by a fellow > with a rather familiar name: > > http://www.sydex.com/pertec.html > > According to my Kennedy manual, issuing a read command causes the drive to > return one block of data. I can see how that would be used in block-oriented > applications in which blocks may be randomly read, written and re-written on > the tape. But most of my magtape experience has been using the tapes in a > streaming mode, such as when reading/writing one or more tar archives > separated by file marks. > > When writing a tar archive on a magtape from a Unix system, is the archive > written as a sequence of fixed-size blocks? Or is the entire tar archive > effectively written as one continuous block which must be streamed with no > repositioning? > > I'm curious because I'm daydreaming about how to build a tape drive interface > controller, and I wonder whether it might need to potentially stream an > entire tape in one go vs. being able to safely assume some maximal block size. > -- The contents of this e-mail and any attachments are intended solely for the use of the named addressee(s) and may contain confidential and/or privileged information. Any unauthorized use, copying, disclosure, or distribution of the contents of this e-mail is strictly prohibited by the sender and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and delete this e-mail.