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From: cowan@mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan)
Subject: [TUHS] why does tar have the tape device hard coded into it and why is it mt1 instead of mt0
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2015 15:57:27 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20151212205727.GE15143@mercury.ccil.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <566C6D60.40205@mhorton.net>

Mary Ann Horton scripsit:

> But we never had dectapes and I think they did their own blocking.

Indeed.  A DECtape (aka microtape) was logically speaking a floppy disk
sliced into cylinders and then concatenated.  As a result it was possible
to rewrite any block without affecting later blocks, something not true
of conventional ("macro") tape.

My first system, a PDP-8/M, used a single DECtape drive as its system
"disk"; the second system, a PDP-8/A, used an 8-inch floppy.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Don't be so humble.  You're not that great.
        --Golda Meir



  parent reply	other threads:[~2015-12-12 20:57 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2015-12-12  2:09 Doug McIlroy
2015-12-12 18:54 ` Mary Ann Horton
2015-12-12 19:58   ` Armando Stettner
2015-12-12 20:13   ` Clem Cole
2015-12-12 22:44     ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2015-12-12 20:57   ` John Cowan [this message]
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2015-12-13  1:41 Norman Wilson
2015-12-13  3:04 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2015-12-12 17:17 [TUHS] TUHS] " Doug McIlroy
2015-12-12 20:17 ` [TUHS] " Diomidis Spinellis
2015-12-11 22:27 Will Senn
2015-12-11 22:31 ` Clem Cole
2015-12-11 22:52   ` Will Senn
2015-12-11 23:13     ` John Cowan
2015-12-12  0:26       ` Random832

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