[Info-vax] TK50 - this is annoying...

[JF Mezei]

On 12-10-09 18:30, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> http://downloads.quantum.com/sdlt320/handbook.pdf page 2.3
> 

very pleasant to see Quantum acknowledge Digital's leadership/expertise
and good design for what became the DLT system.

People poo-poo the TK50, but the general design has lasted until today,
so it couldn't have been all bad. Sure, they changed the positioN/number
of rollers, but they kept many of the principles (such as a read head
after the write head to check that the data was written properly).

When discussing how fast the TK50 wasn't,  was this due to the tape
advance speed relative to data density ? Or was it just how the
controller on the Q-BUS was implememted ?

It seemed to be that once the TK50 had found your data, it wasn't so
slow loading it. (aka: data transfer speeds didn't seem that bad, but
the "seek" to get to it was terrible (understatement)).

A "DIR MUA0:" to find the name of the savesets on it wasn't a "go out
for coffee", it was a "go back home for dinner, watch TV, get 8 hours of
sleep, wake up, get breakfast and goto office hoping the command had
ended" type :-)