What's magtape good for anyway?

[Ed G.]

> OSF/1 "ltf") or just used "dd" and a lot of hard work.

Is 'dd' Unix's primary tool for dealing with tape drives?

> The lack of a record structure that is built-in to the Unix filesystem
> really makes things like tape transfers quite irritating.  The rest of
> the world isn't always just a stream of bytes!

There are certain areas of Unix that don't seem quite "done" to me. 
Printing comes to mind (compare Unix benign neglect with Windows'
universal printer driver).  

My understanding is that the Unix philosophy was to provide raw and
cooked drivers for all the devices.  That way you could have access 
to the hardware if you needed it, or cushy operating system services 
if you didn't.  Only the cooked mode for the tape devices doesn't 
seem to do much more than the raw mode.

Seems to me that they could have easily added file system services
for tape drives to the kernel, just like they did for hard disks.
Was support for tape another area that the Wizzards at Bell Labs
neglected in favor of other more urgent needs?

Ed

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