[Info-vax] Next release of OpenVMS x86

[Terry Kennedy]

On Friday, July 10, 2020 at 12:07:53 PM UTC-4, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> IanD  <iloveopenvms at gmail.com> wrote:
> >I never remember digital engineers being as open and as Frank as the VSI on=
> >es
> 
> "The TK50?  It's a piece of shit.  You shouldn't have wasted your money on
>  these.  They asked a bunch of typewriter designers to make a tape drive, so
>  what do you expect?  It's going to break again in a couple weeks, so I am
>  leaving you a bag of spare take-up leaders."
>    -- Seymour, our DEC FE

On the EFT MicroVAX II we received (s/n 414, I believe EFT started at 400 or 401) MicroVMS was distributed on a zillion floppy disks and not tape. After laboriously installing it, we tried to make a backup to the TK50 and the drive immediately jammed. This was the prerelease TK50 that only had the lighted red button, not the green "I'm thinking about something" LED. Field Service came out to look at it and refused to work on it, claiming it was non-DEC as "DEC wouldn't make a piece of crap like this". Subsequent DLT models sprouted an ever-increasing number of LEDs and longer and longer load times (ending up with 8 or 9 LEDs on the TL 8000), which still wasn't enough as there was a firmware FCO to keep the handle latch solenoid from burning out, which had to dual-purpose the "operate handle" LED. Interestingly, the first drive Quantum got to design without "assistance" (meddling) from DEC went back to a couple of LEDs and a load-to-ready time that many customers thought meant the drive was broken. 

To comment on another reply, I was told by a reliable source that the TZ30 was the result of a barroom bet between a DECie and a Mitsubishi engineer about the impossibility of making a half-height DLT drive. Despite the "Z" in the model name, it is *NOT* a SCSI-compatible device. In fact, it can hang both halves of the only controller it was every supported on, the RQZX1. Simple user mode I/O is sufficient.