HP and Overland 9-Track Tape Drives Demo

Three out of four of my vintage 9-track tape drives are working of tonight, including for the very first time my venerable HP 7970E. Time for a video! Each of them is special. The jewel of the collection is the HP 7970E, a tape drive introduced in 1970. I believe this E model is from 1974 or thereabouts. It is serious hardware, and weighs in at 140 lbs. I needed to resurrect it for my HP 21MX system of the same period. It talks only to HP equipment using HP-IB, so it is quite a challenge to bring online. The other tapes were acquired mostly to support this one.

The HP 88780B is its grandson, introduced in 1987, for the quaint sum of $22,400. The auto-loading mechanism is a gem. It will vacuum-thread the tape all by itself. This is the OEM version with the SCSI-1 interface, which makes it noticeably easier to work with on modern computers. Unlike the rarer start/stop HP7970 tape, which can work efficiently on individual records like a disk, the 88780 is a streamer tape. It is optimized for uninterrupted, continuous motion, fast backup writing.

We'll also spin an early 1990's vintage Overland Data OD3201. This is a reasonably sized, reasonably priced, much lower performance drive which was primarily meant for intermittent work with PCs, mainly to retrieve or exchange information from mainframes. This one is unique for its dual interface - a slow but convenient parallel port to hook it up to PCs, and a classic Pertec to hook it up to vintage mainframe equipment.

Both of my Qualstar 1260S SCSI tapes refused to cooperate tonight, so one of them just stands in as a decoration. But you can see it in this video when it is in a better mood, operating with a Mac SE/30:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqIrM...
[edit] I have now repaired both Qualstars, repair video here:
   • Qualstar 1260S 9-Track Magnetic Tape Drive...  

On a 2400 ft reel, the tapes hold about 40 MB of data at 1600 cpi density, and 140 MB at 6250 density.

"st" SCSI tape software utility by John Wilson available here:
http://www.dbit.com/pub/ibmpc/util/

"hpdir" HP-IB tape software by Angsar Kueckes available here:
http://www.hp9845.net/9845/projects/h...

The doc and software for the Overland drive is on my website: https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing...