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To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
cc: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Is this (SCSI) tape drive compatible with FreeBSD? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 31 Aug 1997 14:39:19 +0930."
             <199708310509.OAA01505@word.smith.net.au> 
Date: Sat, 30 Aug 1997 22:19:16 -0700
Message-ID: <2298.873004756@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> I have some not-so-fond memories of being called over by a FOAF to 
> "fix" his TK-50 after he "had a problem" with it.  He'd been playing 
> with the cart and misaligned something so that it wound about five 
> metres of tangled tape onto the takeup spool before jamming tight, or 
> at least that was the condition it was in when _I_ got to see it 8)

Heh.  Well, back when I was in charge of 250 or so uVAX II's and
Vaxstation 2000s at UCB, we had perfectly good TK50s and their cartridges
misbehave so frequently with regard to the detached-follower problem
that all of us carried around a little kit with us for disassembling
the drives and removing tape followers (one of the techs even repaired
the tapes, though I generally just binned them and said "sorry man,
your data's toast" :-).

For those who don't know how the TK-50s used to work, the tape
cartridge has this little stiffened metal tab at the very end of the
tape which the drive latches on to when it's feeding the tape in.
Apparently the bond between tape and metal tab wasn't all that great
back then and would frequently get separated from the tape, rendering
the drive (which retained the tab) inoperable.  Even more fun was when
the tape came detached from the cartridge at the other end, after
you'd read an entire tape into the drive.  You had to take the drive
apart and wind all that tape back off again.

"The horror...  the horror..." :-)

					Jordan