PDP1 3531

Nah... A TU78 was fairly quick, reliable and maintainable. The TU77 wasn't too bad. The TU45 was the demon tape drive spawn from hell from Pertec. They had to pull their engineering staff off of the design of the TU45 to fix that cross between a vacuum column and tension arm drive... cause it was supposed to be a stopgap for DEC LCG until the TU77 was out...

The problem as I was told was the rush conversion of their tension arm drives to a vacuum column drive without enough engineering time.

I was told this by a Tape Drive maintenance instructor at DEC Training in Bedford, MA.

The failures and DEC's difficulty maintaining the beasts on LCG systems (which really needed stuff like STC's or TU78's) caused them to have to pull everyone into ECOing the TU45's to get them semi-reliable.

(...for very small values of semi)

I had two of 'em catch fire while I was doing the SUP-SUS tach gain adjustments.

What's that orange I see by the power supply.

C R A P ... the thing's caught fire. Followed by me blowing on the components that were in full flame until.

Not a good design.

Not even good enough for the market that they were planned for (about 300 were planned to be sold...)

I heard about 10 times that made it to the field.

I figured they were planned for small KS systems and sites with too cheap to use the STC's... that needed something faster than the 45IPS TU-TE16's.

Actually... Tape Stretcher 11's (TS11's) were better than TU45's.

Bill -- -- digital had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! pechter-at-ureachtechnologies.com