What's magtape good for anyway?

[Ed G.]

> The program is short enough I'll include it here.  It should compile
> and run with minimal tweeking on any 'BSD'ish UNIX system.

Thanks!

I was just a plain old user during my college days, so I've never had 
much contact with magtape.

But since magtape seems the easiest way to get data into and out of 
Bob Supnik's emulator, I've been fooling around with (simulated) 
tape a lot lately.

To me (or maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about) it seems
like magtape has a number of deficiencies:

No filenames or directory structure:  just an ordered series of 
bytes.  Which would seem to imply that people must've used tar *a lot*
to get these services.  True?

Padding of files to a multiple of the block size.  Yuck!  If I have
a 312 byte file, I do not want to save it and then retrieve a (to my
eyes anyway) different  512 byte file which has been padded with
200 bytes I didn't put there.  Did this padding of files ever have 
any bad effects? 

So I was wondering, what *did* people use magtape for on these old
Unix systems?

Here are my guesses:

Bad Old Days          What we use now
================================
Archival storage (tape, CD-Roms, Zip drives, floppies) 

Application Software distribution (WWW, CD-Roms, ftp, email, 
floppies) 

System software distribution (CD-Roms, ftp)

Backups (tape)

Transfering a little data (Floppies, email).

Transfering a lot of data (CD-Roms, Zip drives, ftp, tape)

Have I left any significant use for tape out?

Ed G.

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