[Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?

[Zane Healy]

> On Jan 25, 2018, at 4:18 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> Exabytes?
> I know there was some people who thought they couldn't do variable size reocrds, but that is actually incorrect. They can. It might be wasting space on the underlying tape or something, I don't know. But I certainly had Exabytes connected to VAXen and PDP-11s, and used the normal DEC tools to play around, and Exabytes behaves just like any other tape drive, in all aspects.
> 
>  Johnny

Back when the Alpha in question was an AlphaStation 200 4/233, it had an Exabyte EXB-10 tape library hooked to it with at the time “massive” 5GB tapes. :-)  At that time my max disk size was 2GB, and I could still buy new Exabyte tapes.  I have a SCSI box with a Exabyte 8500 drive and a CD-ROM drive setup to hook to any DEC system that needs it.

The Alpha also has a TLZ06 drive installed in it, and a TZ30 and DLT7000 drive that can be hooked up.

So if I cared to trust old tape drives, I have options for my backups.  I don’t, so I’m looking to go virtual.

Zane