Upgrading early BIOS

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "Chuck" == Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> writes:

 Chuck> On 14 Aug 2008 at 12:36, Jules Richardson wrote:
 >> Funny how SCSI seemed to get a bad name for that kind of thing,
 >> yet IDE's reputation stood intact despite all the inconsistencies.

 Chuck> ...
 Chuck> If disks were bad, tapes were far worse.  There was all manner
 Chuck> of mutually-incompatible cheap tape backup out there.  We
 Chuck> insisted as SCSI being the only tape interface that we would
 Chuck> support--there was an ANSI-defined common command set and most
 Chuck> of the later units were read-after-write verification.  I
 Chuck> wonder how many of those old DC2000 carts written on
 Chuck> floppytape drives are still readable?  And who can still read
 Chuck> their Datasonix Pereos tapes? (I've got some Irwin- recorded
 Chuck> DC1000s that I really should check for readability one of
 Chuck> these days).

Sure, but SCSI didn't necessarily cure these issues.  I still have a
4mm DAT drive from Colorado Memories (or some name like that --
acquired by HP years ago).  If I remember right it comes with a SCSI
controller, and it works with that controller -- but not with any
other SCSI controller.  And it requires proprietary software that was
promptly discontinued by HP.

I can still use that drive but only because I still have the Win95
system that can support the software, and the floppies it came on.

Even the mainframe world isn't that painful -- at least not where 1/2
inch tapes are concerned.  7 track is more difficult, and I wouldn't
want to imagine the pain involved in reading 1 inch 14 track tapes
(CDC early 1960s) never mind even more ancient stuff like Uniservo
tapes...  

       paul