Eureka!

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Sun Feb 9 19:49:00 2003

At 06:45 PM 2/9/03 +0000, you wrote:
>> Well I didn't find the Holy Grail but this is close! I went to a
>> hamfest today and in a box of junk I found the operating program for the
>> HP 9877 Mass Memory unit! That's the box that has up to four tape
>
>Well done...

    I thought so :-)


>
>> drives installed and was used to mass duplicate HP 9825 tapes at the HP
>
>FWIW, the 9877 contains a small PSU (based, IIRC, on the 9825 PSU), 1-4
>tape drives, the same number of controller cards (electrically and
>mechanically idendentical to the one in the 9825) and a little interface
>PCB. The last is the only part that's really 'custom' for the 9877.
>
>I assume it connects to the 9825 using a 98032 16 bit interface.

   Correct. somewhere I do have the installation manual for the 9877 and it does clearly show a 98032 interface. I don't remember the option number of the interface but it's probably 77 or 077. That seems to be typical of how HP assigns option numbers on the 98032.


 Do you
>(or anoyne else) have the wiring for the cable and the jumpers for the
>98032?

   No, that's another thing that needs to be found. NASA does have the interface on theirs but I couldn't get them to give me any info about the jumpers or anything other than the interface PN.


That's something else I've not managed to find (98032s I have,
>plenty of them).

   Same here.

>
>[...]
>
>> program for it till now. The tape APPEARS to be in good condition but
>> you know how HP tapes are :-(
>
>If it is readable, can the 9877 be used to duplicate it?

    It should be able to. AFIK the 9877 will duplicate all 9825 tapes. Accroding to an x-HP engineer that was one of the 9825 developers, the 9877 was designed specificly for HP factory use to mass duplicate 9825 tapes so I would think it would duplicate everything. I don't remember if the 9825 has a file protect command or not but if so then it might not duplicate protected files.

   Let's just hope that this tape is good. I need to find somebody that has a 9825 with REAL good tape drive and that can read this tape and make some copies. I'm wondering if there might be any way to read and duplicate the tape that would be gentler on it. Any ideas?

    Joe

>
>-tony
Received on Sun Feb 09 2003 - 19:49:00 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:35:54 BST