> ah, welcome to the club! hehehe

Hehehe....(:+{{...

>  a large number of KA650's dont play nice with TK50s. I pulled my hair out
> for days trying to figure this one out, going through 3 or 4 TK50 
> controllers, 4 or 5 drives, and two processors trying to find a 
> combination that worked. It turns out that most early-rev KA650's have a 
> problem talking to TK50 controllers. One solution is o use a TK70 
> controller, though that didn't work for me, the thing that did was to 
> just use a KA630, as you also discovered.  there was some discussion 
> about this maybe 6 or 7 months ago on the list... check the archives. 

Hair pulling aside.... it did not really sink in until last night, when
I got to swapping all kinds of bits and it did that on all of them.
I was figuring it was possibly a speed/timing issue.  What revs have
the problems and what revs work?

What is the thing with the TK70 controllers?  I tried one, on a lark,
and could not get it to talk TK50.  Is there a switch setting or somesuch
that needs to be twiddled?  My constraint is that I must be able to write
TK50 tapes, reliably, on at least one box.

What about the 4000/200 cpu?  I was thinking of dropping it into the
BA123, once I get the 1.5.1B2 loaded.  Will IT talk TK50 correctly,
or are there any other gotchas with that CPU?

Gee, VAXentoys almost makes ye pull yer hairs out... an' I ain't got
too many left to pull!....(:+\\...

Thanks

Bob