Message-ID: <35A125CA.45FB5455@halcyon.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Jul 1998 12:30:18 -0700
From: "David C. Jenner" <djenner@halcyon.com>
Reply-To: djenner@halcyon.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: wkt@cs.adfa.oz.au, PDP Unix Preservation <pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au>
Subject: Generating 2.11BSD boot tape
References: <199807060358.NAA07988@henry.cs.adfa.oz.au> <19980706134828.B6528@freebie.lemis.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
Precedence: bulk

There hasn't been much traffic here for a while, so maybe I can stir
things up a bit.

I recently acquired a fabulous 9-track tape drive, an M4 9914, which
has both a SCSI and a Pertec interface.  This drive is so smart I
spent a couple of hours playing with it without it being hooked up to
any computer.

What's nice is that I can presumably get around the "high-cost"
bottleneck of using a tape drive on both a PDP-11 and Intel
machines: use the SCSI interface on the PC where the interface is
cheap (already exists) and use the Pertec interface on the -11 where
the interface is cheap (already exists).  Using the opposite interface
on each machine could run up to a total of $2000 US.

So, what I want to do is read my PUPS archive CD-ROM on an Intel
machine and write appropriate 9-track tapes for the -11.  The stumbling
block seems to be software on the Intel side.  SCSI software packages
for MS-DOS or Windows 3.1/95/98/NT run $600, $800, even $1500US.
There must be a way of doing a CD-to-Tape generation with a simple
C-language program using one of the "free" OSes: Linux, FreeBSD,
SCO UnixWare, etc.

If anyone has any experience or ideas with this, I would appreciate
your input.  It would be very easy for me to install and use one of
these OSs on a spare 486 I have.  The question is, which is the most
likely to support SCSI on 9-track tape.

Thanks,
Dave