Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2002 06:50:26 +0100 From: Cliff Sarginson <csfbsd@raggedclown.net> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dectapes (was Re: First test of GPL in court) Message-ID: <20020301055026.GB2196@raggedclown.net> In-Reply-To: <15487.405.365982.645106@guru.mired.org> References: <20020227135103.E64839@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <20020227061336.N12253@rain.macguire.net> <20020227142303.A65635@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <15484.63760.663944.125557@guru.mired.org> <20020227163501.A66574@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <15485.4354.561280.729573@guru.mired.org> <20020228020025.B65094@titus.hanley.stade.co.uk> <15485.40778.433515.165006@guru.mired.org> <20020301035636.C20774@titus.hanley.stade.co.uk> <15487.405.365982.645106@guru.mired.org>
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On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 10:20:37PM -0600, Mike Meyer wrote: > Adrian Wontroba <aw1@stade.co.uk> types: > > On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 09:08:58PM -0600, Mike Meyer wrote: > > > Hey, I remember those. I'm still trying to find someone who's got a > > > working Dectape (the open real kind, not the later ones) so I can see > > > if there's anything interesting on the last backup of my v6 directory. > > Sorry, I've not seen a Dectape since the mid 70s. > > I actually know someone who claims to have one working, and is trying > to get a PDP-11 close enough to it to use. > > > They were an interesting concept - a block addressable tape device, on > > which you could do random access, and thus use it like a s.l.o.w. disk. > > Yup. They were bootable, too, so you could put / on them. > Hee hee, yes I remember doing that as well :) A moderately entertaining exercise. I also remember booting PDP 11/44's in which you had to type into the console some magic octal numbers to get it to read the boot block. There was a single digit difference between the incantation to "read" the block and to "write" it :). Kids today, they're spoilt. In my day there was none of this new-fangled fsck nonsense; we were real system manager in those days, "clri" was our friend. And then that wonderful moment when after repairing the root file system for 30 minutes you typed "sync" before rebooting - and you got the wonderful learning opportunity of doing it all over again :) I do remember the early versions of fsck, one day we let it rip and auto-repair one of the file-systems, it took a long time. We had a beautifully clean system at the end of it though, it had systematically removed every single file on the system. -- Regards Cliff Sarginson -- <csfbsd@raggedclown.net> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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