Re: 9825/35/45 Tape Drive Info Request Message #3 Posted by Ken Mowery on 4 Oct 2002, 9:39 p.m., in response to message #2 by Vassilis Prevelakis
Interesting! I had a brief look around the net since your remarks. Can you give me any leads on how to find this guy or what key words to search for to find his work?
Do you know of a format name for these drives? What is a term to call them, besides HP calculator tape drive?? I know that the media looked very related, but not the same as, the much later "Colorado drive"
The 5420 automatically looks at the internal tape drive to load it's executable on powerup. It appears to have little or no hard stored program and is not smart enough to run the 488 bus until after it boots. Without the tape drive working, it's just a big (expensive) box of flashing lights. Believe me, there is nothing I would like more than plugging in something to fix this, but I'm afraid that it's going to be a bit harder. Even if I do figure out a H/W solution, I will need to figure out how to pull the data off the boot tape I have. I have already tried reading the tape with a 9825 and the data format is different.
Thanks, Ken
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