[Info-vax] Backup TK50 tapes

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> wrote:

(snip, someone wrote)
>> Hmmm ... so why do boot tapes exist ?
>> I know that booting from TK50 takes more than an hour ...
>> But for an historical purpose I'll save those tapes.
 
> I first came across bootable tapes in the IBM world circa 1980 
> and yes the IBM 4331 could boot from a 9 track tape.

Should be able to boot (I mean IPL) from cards, or any other input
device. I believe that the IPL program written to disk is still
in 80 byte records. 
 
> When bootable TK50s arrived I welcomed the ability but quickly realised 
> that I didn't want to spend an hour watching the tape load.  I had 
> already learned how to put standalone backup onto disks to avoid the 
> pain of using the even slower TU58 cassettes so simply continued with 
> that approach.

I beleive that TK50 is much faster than TU58, and there are stories
about booting the latter.

-- glen