[Simh] VAX 8200

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2017-03-17 18:23, Paul Koning wrote:
>
>> On Mar 17, 2017, at 1:17 PM, Wilm Boerhout <wboerhout at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Gary Lee Phillips schreef op 17-3-2017 om 16:54:
>>> Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com <mailto:ethan.dicks at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> That's earlier than is possible... the model was introduced in Jan,
>>>> 1986.  Don't know date of first ship.
>>>
>>> Well I did say "around 1985 or so." After 30+ years, I'd say that was a pretty close guess.
>>>
>>> The tape drive was not TK50. It was standard reel to reel media, horizontal like an studio audio tape deck, with a cover that had to be lifted in order to use it. The disk drive was housed in the same cabinet in a drawer below the tape unit. The tape drive was "finicky" and seemed to work only with tapes ordered through DEC. The standard tapes our much larger IBM shop used never read back correctly when written on it.
>> Could it have been a TS11, nicknamed "Tape Stretcher-11" by those (me included) who tried to use it with ever longer, reels of tape and thus ever thinner tape?
>
> Probably not, because the TS11 was a vertical unit. The top mounted horizontal one is the TU80 and friends.

Agreed. The description only math the TU80 and TU81.
While those two drives look almost identical, the electronics inside 
what pretty different.
(And the TA models were the same drives, but with a different interface.)

> There was also a drive that had the tape loaded from the front, horizontally (RK05 fashion), I forgot what that was called.  It wasn't all that reliable since it had to do autoload, no manual threading possible.

TSV05. I don't have super much experience with it, but I was constantly 
surprised that it was more reliable than I would have expected. (Which 
isn't saying much...)

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
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