[TUHS] Setting up an X Development Environment for Mac OS

Kevin Bowling kevin.bowling at kev009.com
Sun Jan 29 10:31:49 AEST 2023


I'm not sure about 8mm tape specifically but the Exabyte drives that
were common on 1990s UNIX systems failed a lot.

There was a large proliferation of tape technology in the 1980s and
1990s, many of them not great in any dimension.

DLT, LTO, and especially the "enterprise" ranges from StorageTek or
IBM from any time period are all extremely reliable.

On Sat, Jan 28, 2023 at 3:16 PM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 27 Jan 2023, Larry McVoy wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > I've never seen a more fragile system than those exabyte.  By
> > comparison, the old SCSI QIC 150s, while small, were industructible, I
> > think you could have used the tapes as hammers and they'd still read.
> > Same thing for 9 track.
>
> My experience with Exabytes was different; we used "data" tapes, not the
> cheaper "video" tapes and had no problems over many years.
>
> In fact, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data8 we see:
>
>     ``The cassettes have the same dimensions and construction as the
>       cassettes used in 8 mm video format recorders and camcorders.''
>
> In other words, they are not the same thing...
>
> -- Dave


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