On November 5, you wrote:
> (Used to?  I still run all my backups on DC2120XLs!)  The cartridge
> mechanism is the same but TU58 tapes use a totally different format, if
> you look you'll see that every cartridge has a 1978 copyright on it just
> for that.  It figures they were afraid of people stealing their method
> for storing practically nothing on the tape.

  The TU58 was never intended as a backup or production medium.  It
was designed to replace the TU55/TU56 as a small file-structured
random access device.  That's right, I said random access.  "But wait,
tapes are sequentially accessed..."  Yes.  But TU58 tapes (and TU55/56
tapes) have blocks with block numbers which can be accessed randomly
like a disk.

  Anyway, that's the strength of those tapes that they wanted to
protect...not the actual encoding format.


                             -Dave McGuire
                              mcguire@neurotica.com