[Info-vax] Backup TK50 tapes

[Paul Sture]

In article <kgghtv$8r8$1 at speranza.aioe.org>,
 glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:

> 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. 

We had the first IBM in the UK that came without a card reader.  You 
soon became familiar with setting up spool files on disk and redirecting 
stuff.  It was amusing to see visiting consultants struggle without a 
card reader :-)

> > 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.

The TK50 certainly was much faster than the TU58.  The pair of 11/750s I 
ran had disk capable boot ROMs, which meant I only rarely needed to 
press the TU58 into action.

-- 
Paul Sture