[TUHS] Choice of Tape Format for BTL UNIX Distro

[Ron Natalie via TUHS]

We had 6250 drives at BRL in the mid-eighties.   I had one in my living 
room around 1987 when I was writing device drivers for the thing for a 
company I was working on the side for.   It was a Multibus II system 
that I had reverse engineered the message passing coprocessor kernel 
drivers for.



------ Original Message ------
>From "Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) via TUHS" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
To arnold at skeeve.com; "Arnold Robbins via TUHS" <tuhs at tuhs.org>
Date 7/9/2026 1:29:12 PM
Subject [TUHS] Re: Choice of Tape Format for BTL UNIX Distro

>Arnold Robbins via TUHS writes:
>
>>  I think at some point 9 track tape drives hit something like 6400 BPI,
>>  but I may be hallucinating the memory.
>
>By at least the mid-1980s, 6250 BPI drives were available.  But
>they were expensive, so software for geneneral distribution was
>usually shipped on 1600 BPI tapes to be comatible with the majority
>of tape drives.
>
>6250 drives could read/write 1600 tapes, and many could handle 800
>BPI as well.
>
>--lyndon