Wow this certainly brings back some memories. I used one of these 30 years ago in my first job in IT. I always found the auto loading feature pretty impressive. It hardly ever failed.
A few years ago I picked up a unit very similar to this when it was being thrown away. Sadly, I didn't get around to even powering it up before I needed to condense my toy collection. In the case of this beautiful machine, I disassembled it into Useful Bits (including 2 very beefy DC motors, and bunches of sensors) which are now waiting for a new life in some project yet to come.
From a Alpha/HP3000 tech it’s great to see this old stuff immortalized on your video! Thanks for taking the time to make the Video! Looks like our warehouse.
douro20 my dad used a Machine running MS-DOS 3.something for invoices up until a few years ago. It had a ~230MB hard drive and we still have all the backups on 5 1/4 floppys.
German railways (DB) was once seeking for old 286 PC's because their timetable boards (flapper boards) have been controlled by such systems. They needed spare parts because they could not afford to replace all those boards at once. Some of them worked for 30 years.
Some video recorder technology in there: The end sensor reflective strips were used on the Philips VCR format (N1500, N1700, SVC) and the sapphire tape cleaning block idea is used on Sony Betacam, DigiBeta, HDCAM formats.
Awesome - brings back memories. My first tape drives were the DEC TU80/81s - top load 9-track drives which had to be manually loaded. Was always fun doing backups with a stack of reels.
@@PlaywithJunk YES, especially F880 and M890 not so much on the M995. After 30 years working on them I still remember some of the codes, I.E 451335 ,452235 .....
@@connervantu Yeah... and changing the bearings when the guide rollers were noisy. I would like to repair this M995 but I have no parts. Hard to find the problem with no spare parts :-)
@@PlaywithJunk Yes, you are correct about the parts. Even then, it was hard to find parts due to not many been made, unlike the M990. But those rollers guide you can use the one from M990 or F890 ... NO ? .
@@10GTech There has to be a space in front of the first asterisk and a space after the second asterisk. ( *example* ) Surround in underlines for italics ( _example_ ) Text can be bold italic as well ( *_example_* )
Hmmm. Makes me wonder if things like memory speeds and CPU speeds on home PCs of that era were really 666Mhz but they just showed on the screen as 667Mhz to prevent too much public outcry? Or if the reason for that was due to rounding, such as if it was something like 666.666 MHz they just rounded it up to 667?
@@Darknecros7 Probably superstitious rubbish lol. Kinda like hotels in the US not having a 13th floor :D Seriously tho......more than likely it was roundng up .
Nice video :) My first time a was using internet was in a library 1997 and they had DIGITAL PCs everywere. But around 2003/2004 when a was in school they had 3 wagons full of old electronic scrap and a did find a Digital Venturis-FP 575 in there that a did keep and a still have it but not touched it for around 10 years now. I have 3 Compaq Deskpro 2000 in storage but a know one of them need new psu.
Having PTSDs watching this. Worked for MCI for years and all our voice billing went through IBM Adjunct processors that had these drives, branded as IBM, of coarse. For the most part, they worked well but when they went wrong, they went honorably wrong. If you turned you back on it while loading, you could end up with a few thousand feet of magnetic tape vomiting out the front of the drive.
those movaable arms also moved the tape a few inches without moving the reels. This allowed reading a block of data without moving the reels to the next block. Other drives used vacuum columns to pull a few inches of tape past the heads.
I'm sorry but I have to correct you. The tension arm assembly is only to maintain a constant tension (hence the name). It provided a bit of extra tape travel to compensate timing differences between the supply and takeup reel. But it has not the same function as vacuum channels. For start-stop operation you need a third motor, a capstan motor which accelerates and stops the tape very quickly to write single data blocks. The reel motors can't do that. This drive has cache RAM and collects data to write it on tape in a long stream. This is why those drives are also called "streamers" **smartass/off** :-)
Oh - and a note on the capacity... practically speaking, a 6250bpi tape could hold about 140MB - depending on block size - small blocks would waste space due to overhead. (I think VMS used a 8192 byte block by default for the BACKUP utility). Again - fun stuff.
Sure - you'd use tar if you were running a version of unix - but OpenVMS was common on the Alpha boxes (and VAXen before them) - and VMS came with it's own BACKUP utility.
I never used Freon. Everything can be cleaned with Isopropyl alcohol (tape heads and rollers) or window cleaner (for the chassis parts). Normally there is not much to clean except the head and the tape scraper.
@@PlaywithJunk Thank you. Do you know of a shop or anyone who repairs these drives? I have 2 Qualstar's and an Overland data that need repair. I live in Florida.
I believe HP and Cipher were the only two companies who made auto-threading tape drives. I almost bought an AlphaServer 2100A 4/275 once but since my parents and I were moving I wasn't allowed to...
The M4 Data 9914 was an auto loading table top or rack mounted drive. In addition to 1600 (PE) and 6250 (GCR) it also supported 800 (NRZ) and 3200 (DPE). A lot of the more modern 9-track drives didn't support 800 bpi so the 9914 was useful to have if you needed to read an older 800 bpi tape. I had a 9914 for a while but got rid of it after the rubber on the tach roller turned to goo and it could no longer correctly sense the tape speed. Didn't want to deal with trying to fix it at the time.
Hello, I was very and pleasantly surprised that I found your video here demonstrating the "oldie goldie" DEC TSZ07 tape drive. I am in fact working on a small project trying to restore some older records / data from backup tape that was created on DEC drive and OVMS "few years" ago. I also have DS20E, DS10 and DS25 servers - but somehow none of these servers can find and show the tape unit under the console commands - the way you have demonstrated here. May I ask what the model or type of your PCI SCSI controller that you have in the DS20E? I tried few different controllers - connected the SCSI-2 cable (same as you have) with help of additional converters / dongles - to the SE port of KZPBA-CA, Adaptec AHA-2940U2W as well tried KPZAA and also KPZCA. The TSZ07-AA works fine off-line, i.e. powers up, loads and unloads the tape, passes the self test - but it cannot be detected by the controller. I tried the same verification process on DS10 and DS25 - all with firmware 7.3 - but no luck. Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. Thank you - Jan
Hello Do you see the PKA or PKB device at "show device"? This is the SCSI controller itself.... if you can't see that, you can't see any SCSI devices. When I remember right, you need SCSI controllers with the right firmware for Alpha. Here you can see what controllers should work: manualzz.com/doc/732658/quickspecs I think I have one of those controllers inside the DS20e... Then check the SCSI chain... do you have a single ended (SE) controller? SE Terminator (do you have one?)? SE tape drive? LVD/SE does also work. HVD (High voltage differential) is not compatible and needs a converter to LVD/SE. Also check the SCSI ID of your bus. Controller should be 7, devices can be everywhere except 7. On many controllers you also can't connect internal and external devices at the same time. All your KZPxx controllers should work fine, those are original DEC. Are your converters LVD/SE too? That's important since some of them terminate the higher 8 bits (wide to narrow converter). This termination must be correct. Best regards Christian
Hi! I've just got a request for loan of my TSZ07 from an ex colleague and friend, not sure yet what he needs it for but probably I would have to give him a DS10 as well to drive the beast! Did you work for DEC in Switzerland? Geneva perhaps? If so we might have crossed paths in the mid 70s, when I was at DEC Milano in those years.. ciao Luigi M
it's from the 1990's. I kept it because you never know if someone comes with old tapes and wants to copy them to a modern format. But now, since it is not working anymore, I'm not sure what I do with it.
That could be done. But it is much easier to record digital data on an analog tape drive than otherwise. You would need to make a new read/write amplifier and I doubt that the tape speed is precise enough for a quality recording.
That's a very nice machine. Shame that it is pretty useless in today's storage space hungy environments. I was wondering about the capacity too, good that you added that in the comments. Calculated that 800 BPI tape you had in there with 35 MByte total raw capacity if it would be 1100m long. So probably 25 MB after overhead removed.
In home tape deck, the obvius benefit of a three head machine, is you can monitor your recording as it is made. But this also have another purpose. Recording head and playback head had opossite requirements by design. A R/P head is a trade off while separate heads allow and optimal RECORD head and OPTIMAL play head. I made a big mistake when purchased my first three head unit. IT COULDNT MONITOR the recording as it was made. I though this was a complete no sense ... should be an error. In the end found this information so this deck had three head just to get more quality on both functions
Some sort of...yes. But GCR was a thing before Commodore used it and they made their own version which is not compatible to others (ie Apple). But yes, it's the same principle. 🙂
@@PlaywithJunk I loved GCR because it was way more effective then MFM. Too bad the PC didnt use it. Also on the end of that video there was a PC in junk I really would love to have, too bad this video is so old! ;-)
I know GCR from the Cipher tape drives I used to repair. The really big ones were actually named "GCR Cache Tape" and they were really proud if it. It boosted the data density from 3200 BPI to 6250 BPI.
Wow this certainly brings back some memories. I used one of these 30 years ago in my first job in IT. I always found the auto loading feature pretty impressive. It hardly ever failed.
Yep, it does a great job. Has anyone heard of one failing to load?
We were engineers who repaired these great machines once...long back. Thanks for the video.
And we got schematics and proper curcuit descriptions that helped us repairing these things. Todays stuff is not built to repair...
i could watch it self threading all day, great video
No no no no no. This is definitely NOT junk.....
A few years ago I picked up a unit very similar to this when it was being thrown away. Sadly, I didn't get around to even powering it up before I needed to condense my toy collection. In the case of this beautiful machine, I disassembled it into Useful Bits (including 2 very beefy DC motors, and bunches of sensors) which are now waiting for a new life in some project yet to come.
From a Alpha/HP3000 tech it’s great to see this old stuff immortalized on your video! Thanks for taking the time to make the Video! Looks like our warehouse.
You should see our museum, unfortunately it's in storage in the basement. There is even a VAX750 and a TU78 tape drive.
There is a farm equipment shop just up the road from me which still runs an HP 3000 minicomputer from the early '90s for their shop management system.
douro20 my dad used a Machine running MS-DOS 3.something for invoices up until a few years ago. It had a ~230MB hard drive and we still have all the backups on 5 1/4 floppys.
German railways (DB) was once seeking for old 286 PC's because their timetable boards (flapper boards) have been controlled by such systems. They needed spare parts because they could not afford to replace all those boards at once. Some of them worked for 30 years.
Some video recorder technology in there: The end sensor reflective strips were used on the Philips VCR format (N1500, N1700, SVC) and the sapphire tape cleaning block idea is used on Sony Betacam, DigiBeta, HDCAM formats.
Awesome technology, thank you for sharing!!!
Awesome - brings back memories. My first tape drives were the DEC TU80/81s - top load 9-track drives which had to be manually loaded. Was always fun doing backups with a stack of reels.
Oh man, Oh man . I remembered these drive well . CIPHER . I used to be an expert fixing these things F880,M890,M990 and M995. Good old time.
So you changed a lot of motor drive transistors... :-)
@@PlaywithJunk YES, especially F880 and M890 not so much on the M995. After 30 years working on them I still remember some of the codes, I.E 451335 ,452235 .....
@@connervantu Yeah... and changing the bearings when the guide rollers were noisy.
I would like to repair this M995 but I have no parts. Hard to find the problem with no spare parts :-)
@@PlaywithJunk Yes, you are correct about the parts. Even then, it was hard to find parts due to not many been made, unlike the M990. But those rollers guide you can use the one from M990 or F890 ... NO ? .
The M995 is harder to work on due to the motherboard lots of surface mount components.
I just found out how to get *bold* font in comments :-)
Just place the text in the asterisk (*)
(*example*)
@@10GTech There has to be a space in front of the first asterisk and a space after the second asterisk. ( *example* )
Surround in underlines for italics ( _example_ )
Text can be bold italic as well ( *_example_* )
@@RaymondHng *bold* _italic_ example fail
The processor of the beast! Love it \M/
Greeting from Ireland. Great video as always.
Hmmm. Makes me wonder if things like memory speeds and CPU speeds on home PCs of that era were really 666Mhz but they just showed on the screen as 667Mhz to prevent too much public outcry? Or if the reason for that was due to rounding, such as if it was something like 666.666 MHz they just rounded it up to 667?
@@Darknecros7 Probably superstitious rubbish lol. Kinda like hotels in the US not having a 13th floor :D
Seriously tho......more than likely it was roundng up .
Wow! Really cool stuff you have there! That's the kind of stuff i would like to collect if i had the money and space.
That's why I collect it on TH-cam ;-)
Nice video :) My first time a was using internet was in a library 1997 and they had DIGITAL PCs everywere. But around 2003/2004 when a was in school they had 3 wagons full of old electronic scrap and a did find a Digital Venturis-FP 575 in there that a did keep and a still have it but not touched it for around 10 years now. I have 3 Compaq Deskpro 2000 in storage but a know one of them need new psu.
As I remember using ptr to load the airport checkin system to the mini computer I spelt over night four hours in late 1978
That's a cool workplace!. I also have one of those sparcstations!
Cipher drives were used by IBM on the Series/1 and System/88.
DDS in several versions the backup time was long, also DLT drive. I used to deal also with a MO backup system, but it was a smaller scale.
My first real job was administrating a bunch of Sun 3-series computers. I spent a lot of time swapping reels out every week during system backups!
Having PTSDs watching this. Worked for MCI for years and all our voice billing went through IBM Adjunct processors that had these drives, branded as IBM, of coarse. For the most part, they worked well but when they went wrong, they went honorably wrong. If you turned you back on it while loading, you could end up with a few thousand feet of magnetic tape vomiting out the front of the drive.
Yeah I know... :-)
But if they are cleaned and maintained properly, they were very reliable. You also had to shape the tape end correctly.
those movaable arms also moved the tape a few inches without moving the reels. This allowed reading a block of data without moving the reels to the next block. Other drives used vacuum columns to pull a few inches of tape past the heads.
I'm sorry but I have to correct you. The tension arm assembly is only to maintain a constant tension (hence the name). It provided a bit of extra tape travel to compensate timing differences between the supply and takeup reel.
But it has not the same function as vacuum channels. For start-stop operation you need a third motor, a capstan motor which accelerates and stops the tape very quickly to write single data blocks. The reel motors can't do that.
This drive has cache RAM and collects data to write it on tape in a long stream. This is why those drives are also called "streamers"
**smartass/off** :-)
Wish I could visit you and bring home some stuff that you guys as a company would disassemble and/or send it to the junk.
Really interesting video!
Du hast ein geiles Job.Great video.👍👍👍👍👍
Oh - and a note on the capacity... practically speaking, a 6250bpi tape could hold about 140MB - depending on block size - small blocks would waste space due to overhead. (I think VMS used a 8192 byte block by default for the BACKUP utility). Again - fun stuff.
No one used tar to write to tape?
Sure - you'd use tar if you were running a version of unix - but OpenVMS was common on the Alpha boxes (and VAXen before them) - and VMS came with it's own BACKUP utility.
I have this very machine. What are you using to keep the tape path clean as Freon is now hard to get?
I never used Freon. Everything can be cleaned with Isopropyl alcohol (tape heads and rollers) or window cleaner (for the chassis parts). Normally there is not much to clean except the head and the tape scraper.
@@PlaywithJunk Thank you. Do you know of a shop or anyone who repairs these drives? I have 2 Qualstar's and an Overland data that need repair. I live in Florida.
I believe HP and Cipher were the only two companies who made auto-threading tape drives.
I almost bought an AlphaServer 2100A 4/275 once but since my parents and I were moving I wasn't allowed to...
The M4 Data 9914 was an auto loading table top or rack mounted drive. In addition to 1600 (PE) and 6250 (GCR) it also supported 800 (NRZ) and 3200 (DPE). A lot of the more modern 9-track drives didn't support 800 bpi so the 9914 was useful to have if you needed to read an older 800 bpi tape. I had a 9914 for a while but got rid of it after the rubber on the tach roller turned to goo and it could no longer correctly sense the tape speed. Didn't want to deal with trying to fix it at the time.
Pertec made autoloaders in the mid-1980s that were plug-compatible with Cipher drives. Also another company, but I don't remember their name.
Glen Slick,
Didn’t HP just license their 88780 to them?
Hello, I was very and pleasantly surprised that I found your video here demonstrating the "oldie goldie" DEC TSZ07 tape drive.
I am in fact working on a small project trying to restore some older records / data from backup tape that was created on DEC drive and OVMS "few years" ago.
I also have DS20E, DS10 and DS25 servers - but somehow none of these servers can find and show the tape unit under the console commands - the way you
have demonstrated here.
May I ask what the model or type of your PCI SCSI controller that you have in the DS20E? I tried few different controllers - connected the SCSI-2 cable
(same as you have) with help of additional converters / dongles - to the SE port of KZPBA-CA, Adaptec AHA-2940U2W as well tried KPZAA and also KPZCA.
The TSZ07-AA works fine off-line, i.e. powers up, loads and unloads the tape, passes the self test - but it cannot be detected by the controller.
I tried the same verification process on DS10 and DS25 - all with firmware 7.3 - but no luck.
Any assistance will be greatly appreciated. Thank you - Jan
Hello
Do you see the PKA or PKB device at "show device"? This is the SCSI controller itself.... if you can't see that, you can't see any SCSI devices.
When I remember right, you need SCSI controllers with the right firmware for Alpha. Here you can see what controllers should work: manualzz.com/doc/732658/quickspecs
I think I have one of those controllers inside the DS20e...
Then check the SCSI chain... do you have a single ended (SE) controller? SE Terminator (do you have one?)? SE tape drive? LVD/SE does also work. HVD (High voltage differential) is not compatible and needs a converter to LVD/SE.
Also check the SCSI ID of your bus. Controller should be 7, devices can be everywhere except 7.
On many controllers you also can't connect internal and external devices at the same time.
All your KZPxx controllers should work fine, those are original DEC.
Are your converters LVD/SE too? That's important since some of them terminate the higher 8 bits (wide to narrow converter). This termination must be correct.
Best regards
Christian
Austrian Accent for sure :)...insane machine, loading tape using air. What if the tape spins during loading?
You mean if it twists? That never happens. The tape is thick enough to aty stable all the time.
BTW: Swiss accent
Do you have drive ibm tape 3490E
Maybe Curious Marc's group could help with tape drive diagnostics?
great video
We called it EOT and BOT sensor - end of tape, beginning of tape
That is the official term... and BOT/EOT markers on the tape. I still have a roll of them :-)
I am also want buy some junk like these. But don’t know where to buy it
Hi! I've just got a request for loan of my TSZ07 from an ex colleague and friend, not sure yet what he needs it for but probably I would have to give him a DS10 as well to drive the beast!
Did you work for DEC in Switzerland? Geneva perhaps? If so we might have crossed paths in the mid 70s, when I was at DEC Milano in those years..
ciao
Luigi M
What is the manufacturing date of this unit? Are they still in use or is it a clean-the-basement-thing?
it's from the 1990's. I kept it because you never know if someone comes with old tapes and wants to copy them to a modern format. But now, since it is not working anymore, I'm not sure what I do with it.
Play with Junk The idea with the electric bike sounds charming. I guess nobody else has a SCSI controlled electric bike
@@chrisridesbicycles And if you don't have SCSI you can eventually get there, although by driving 2 seconds forward, 1 second back and so on...
this can be used to record music, like what we used to tear apart data tapes and move the tape into audio cassettes.
That could be done. But it is much easier to record digital data on an analog tape drive than otherwise. You would need to make a new read/write amplifier and I doubt that the tape speed is precise enough for a quality recording.
you've heard of 8-track, now get ready for:
what is this machine
Did you activate that windows copy?
Sure! You find that key on every 1990's corn flakes box.
A great work! By the way, how long time takes to copy one 9 track tape to HDD?
depend on the lenght of the tape up to 20 minutes?
@@PlaywithJunk I have some for reading. How can we chat?
.@@fgsipn75 i'm sorry to say but the drive is not working and I have no parts to repair it
That's a very nice machine. Shame that it is pretty useless in today's storage space hungy environments. I was wondering about the capacity too, good that you added that in the comments. Calculated that 800 BPI tape you had in there with 35 MByte total raw capacity if it would be 1100m long. So probably 25 MB after overhead removed.
Do they not have dust in your part of the world?
If the devices come from a airconditioned computer room, there is no dust to get into the things.
In home tape deck, the obvius benefit of a three head machine, is you can monitor your recording as it is made. But this also have another purpose. Recording head and playback head had opossite requirements by design. A R/P head is a trade off while separate heads allow and optimal RECORD head and OPTIMAL play head. I made a big mistake when purchased my first three head unit. IT COULDNT MONITOR the recording as it was made. I though this was a complete no sense ... should be an error. In the end found this information so this deck had three head just to get more quality on both functions
This is data tape mate.
Hi, iam andri i am looking for 21 track tqpe drive
sad to see those dells get scrapped, they could be reconditioned and sold on ebay easily since they re light
They use Commodore GCR? Really? Thats cool!
Some sort of...yes. But GCR was a thing before Commodore used it and they made their own version which is not compatible to others (ie Apple). But yes, it's the same principle. 🙂
@@PlaywithJunk I loved GCR because it was way more effective then MFM. Too bad the PC didnt use it.
Also on the end of that video there was a PC in junk I really would love to have, too bad this video is so old! ;-)
I know GCR from the Cipher tape drives I used to repair. The really big ones were actually named "GCR Cache Tape" and they were really proud if it. It boosted the data density from 3200 BPI to 6250 BPI.
😁Great
Oh PdP 11/73 my favor machine
Also NEC Mini 2 very good mini computer copy machine of dec psp11/73
you should add capacity into info
done...
rs agarwaen 16 Kb :))))))
Alpha run Microsoft NT at that year very power full
And 3480 drive
moreeeee
Состояние как новый
Yes but it does not work....
27:20 666 MHz... Your DS20E is evil... :)
That's why Intel had 667MHz Pentiums... But it's stil 333MHZ x2 🙂
3590
great video