[rescue] tk50 tape drives

[Mike Parson]

On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 02:39:45AM +0100, Mike Meredith wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Oct 2004 17:06:15 -0400, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> Sat, 02 Oct 2004 @ 14:03 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:
>>> I show the TK50 being a DLT drive on some pages, but having 95MB
>>> tapes on others.  This doesn't seem consistent.  I'm assuming the
>>> latter is correct?
>>
>> It's definitely not DLT.
>>
>> I didn't realize there was a naming conflict though.
>
> I'm not entirely sober, so I could easily be wrong. TK50's are the
> predecessor of DLTs with the same form factor. I've only ever
> encountered them in microVAXen. I think the tapes themselves were called
> CompacTape's, TK70 tapes were CompacTapeII's and the first DLTs were
> CompacTapeIII's

This meshes with my recollection of how it went as well.  The "Digital"
part of "Digital Linear Tape" was from Digital Electronics Corp (DEC).
They made the original drives, then later sold/licensed/whatever
the technology to Quantum, who made it 'better' and rebranded DEC's
TKfoo/CompacTape as DLT.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org