25 Nov
2019
25 Nov
'19
6:18 p.m.
I had a hand-held degausser, but lent it to someone years ago
and never got it back.
It was actually Exabyte that made me buy it. I bought a new
8505 through a reseller to supersede the 8200 I was using for
home backups. It turned out the 8505's firmware refused to
overwrite a tape already written at any but the highest density,
so I couldn't reuse any of my existing backup tapes. Exabyte
insisted it was a feature, not a bug. So I gave up and bought
a degausser so I could turn a used tape into a blank tape so
the damn tape drive would write on it.
For further vintage-computing amusement: I decided to buy at
that time because the reseller had arranged a deal with Exabyte:
trade in any old tape drive, working or not, and get a couple of
hundred bucks off on a brand-new 8505. So I gave the reseller
an old, broken TK05 I had lying around. My sales contact for
the reseller was a former service tech at the same company, so
I figured (correctly) he'd get the joke.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON