there was a 7970b hp tape drive that was 7 track drive at one tine I
had the fortune to get one that came from a 2000 system that wrote
telemetry from crash dummies and found a good$$$$ customer for it. all
that aside... it would interface with an hp 2100 or 21mx if you can
find one it will probably work and work well as all the 7970 series
tape drives served us wonderfully. Now....wish I has saved it... but...at
the tie the money paid for that parts 2000 system We got plus a
number of months rent for the business ca. 1981 and most important that
2000 donor system gave us an XYD board for the core array that a
month later we needed when one of ours croaked Ed# SMECC Museum Project In
a message dated 7/20/2020 1:10:59 AM US Mountain Standard Time,
cctalk@classiccmp.org writes:
Hi, I bumped into an old friend of mine today. We both talked about a pair
ofmachines we worked on that no longer exist as far as we cant tell. Theywere
both Adage machines and had the same base digital architecture. Theirnames are
Ambilog 200 and AGT-30. The Ambilog was the predecessor to theAGT line. The
AGT came in 3 flavors, AGT-10, AGT-30 and AGT-50. The 30seems to have been the
most prevalent. They were 30 bit, one's complement machines. The Ambilog had a
beautifulconsole that used an IO Selectric. It was designed as a 2D vector
graphicsmachine. Here's an image of the Ambilog 200: Ambilog
200<https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/ua023_024-001-bx0010-020-004#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-1317%2C-1%2C8308%2C4470>
The AGT/30 was a very advanced 3D vector machine. The XYZ signals for
thedisplay came from a 4 x 3 "hybrid" matrix multiplier which allowed for
3Dimaging with Z axis depth cueing. The matrix multiplier was a 19 in rackof a
dozen discrete 15 bit multiplying D to A converters. About once ayear it had
to be re-calibrated due to long term drift. Here's a link to an image of an
AGT-30: Adage
AGT-30<https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwhat-when-how.com%2FTutorial%2Ftopic-203v31%2FThe-History-of-Visual-Magic-in-Computers-358.html&psig=AOvVaw3M65q2I5e_Z2Nd6JSfMpDc&ust=1595212226314000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCODysemi2OoCFQAAAAAdAAAAABA9>
And here is it's 1.5 seconds of fame from the SciFi classic "Dark Star":
AGT-30das Blinkenlights <https://youtu.be/ocse-0bBfo8?t=3152> Anyway, it turns
out he has quite a few of the source and backup tapes.Unfortunately they are 7
track 556 BPI. So the question is: is thereanyone out there that can assist
with either reading these tapes or (betteryet) has a 7 track tape head we could
buy? Our goal is to preserve this forgotten machine designed at the start of
thecomputer graphics era. Writing a full emulator is our goal. I live in the
Bay Area. Maybe those of you with connections to CHM couldsee if we could read
the tapes on the 1401. Or maybe one of you has a 7track driver in your junk
file. All we really would need is the head andwe could put it on an existing
drive. As a last option, a commercial taperecovery vendor although that is
probably too pricey. Thanks, Marc Howard
