On 03/05/2017 10:41 AM, Mark J. Blair via cctalk wrote: > > So, was the write enable state latched at some point in the loading > cycle on those drives? That surprises me, because I would have > expected the write enable sensor to interrupt write current as > combinatorial function on the drive, and/or pass sensor status up to > the formatter a combinatorial signal.
Yup. You loaded the tape, then bumped the "finger". As I mentioned, this worked on 60x and 65x drives. Since the autoloaders closed the door as part of the cycle, this probably didn't work for 66x. This actually worked pretty well--you never ran the risk of leaving a ring in inadvertently. The consequence of forgetting to enable write was usually far less dire than mistakenly writing to a tape that was supposed to be read-only. --Chuck