"Charles M. Hannum" writes:
> 
>    I think it got damaged somehow by the bad
>    tape driver we had for a while -- [...]
> 
> The (short-lived) bug in st.c due to the prototype changes could *not*
> have damaged your hardware.  

Things like this have happened to me in the past with tape
drives. Very often, tape drives are ultra-sensitive to being
frequently reset, or being told to do mechanically bad things. Unlike
purely electronic components, or components with fairly robust
mechanical mechanisms like hard drives, tape drives and floppy drives
can indeed be damaged by software.

Perry