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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-10-10 01:35, JF Mezei wrote:
> 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).

The complaints that I have (and have seen others do here) are more 
specific TK50 issues than the general technology as such.

> 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's mostly tape speed.

> 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)).

It still wasn't fast, but yes, just finding the data took most of the 
time. Just loading the tape takes time, since not only is the tape drawn 
in, the header tries to correctly locate the first track, which also 
takes forever. Interesting to watch with the drive exposed, however...

	Johnny