Mature technology, was Re: 7 track tape drives

From: Al Kossow <aek_at_spies.com>
Date: Fri Aug 29 09:44:00 2003

Rumour has it that Al Kossow has managed to do without the formatter, but I have no further information.

--
The current state of the project is a friend of mine fabricated a shim for me to mount
a Cipher 7 track head on a Qualstar 1052 transport. I haven't said much about what I'm
doing because I wanted to buy enough cheap 1052's on eBay for experimentation (I have
about 10 of them now)
The 1052 is a VERY simple transport. I have the docs for it so I can hack the firmware
to just start the tape moving at a constant rate, ignoring BOT, EOT, etc. 
I have a PC done with a bank of Analog Devices 10 bit A/D's and a FIFO which will feed
into my PCI macintosh though a bus mastering PCI ATA controller. Until I get that working
I'm going to use a couple of VMIVME 3115 A/D converter cards attached through a PCI-VME
converter for data capture.
The goal is to get something put together that is small enough to be able to be transportable
so that I can take the setup to where the tapes are, rather than risk having them lost
in shipment.

Received on Fri Aug 29 2003 - 09:44:00 BST