Wangtek streamers

[Steve Neighorn]

In article <446 at tukki.jyu.fi> makela at tukki.jyu.fi (Otto J. Makela) writes:
>We have a 60M Wangtek Streamer drive & card system connected to an 20MHz
>Unisys 800 (same as Acer 1100, more or less) running under 386 uPort 3.0e.
>The drive was obtained through Unisys, and it came with their DOS software
>(the packet was called QIC-60).
>The drive is model 5099EN24, controller card is assy 30850-004 rev G4.
>
>Now, the MicroPort 386 Unix manual says that some Everex systems and one
>Wangtek system are supported.  The card/drive pair is NOT the same as
>mentioned in the manual.  It does work some way, however, when DIPped the
>same way as an Everex card would be.  The operation is not perfect; it
>seems that the system will hang (!) if you try to write beyond the physical
>end-of-tape, so it looks like the Unix thinks this is the 125M streamer
>system.  The streamer system also seems slow (this might be a feature :-)
>
>The $64 question is, are there MicroPort drivers available for these
>streamer systems, and where could I get one ?  MicroPort ?  Wangtek ?
>Does anyone have Wangtek's address/telephone number (Preferrably Europe,
>United States perhaps, Hong Kong as last alternative) ?

<Bounced Mail - hence the posting>

Don't bother with Wangtek, they just sell tape drives. One combination
that works with Microport (all 80386 versions) is the Everex EV832 tape
controller and Wangtek tape driver model 5125EN24.

A few notes on this tape drive stuff:

1) Drivers that you purchase from Microport (I paid $50 a year ago) work
   with both the Everex EV832 card and the Bell Tech tape driver card,
   which is an Everex EV832 with a Bell Tech PAL.

2) The tape driver purchased from Bell Technologies (with Bell's 386 Unix
   offering) will only work Bell Tech's card (ie their PAL). It will not
   recognize the straight Everex card.

3) The Bell Technologies tape driver will automatically recognize either
   the 60meg tape drive, or the 125 meg tape drive, which uses a completely
   different controller and tape drive logic board.

4) To my knowledge, the only tape controller card that is supported by
   the Microport/Bell Tech driver for 60 meg tapes is the Everex card
   and the Bell Tech modified Everex card. You'll have to find out if
   your 30850 card is just-another-name for the Everex card. Now maybe
   this has changed, and more tape drives are now supported, but in the
   dozen and a half systems I have set up with Microport Unix/Bell Tech
   Unix/Intel Unix, the only tape combo I have seen working have been
   based on the Everex controller and the Wangtek tape drive.

5) I found the tape driver that I got from Microport occasionally hung
   the system without any error message at all, and woe to the person
   who accidentally put a write protected tape in, or when using cpio,
   wanted to write a multi-volume tape. Reboot time. I have also found
   that with Bell Tech's Unix 3.2 and their XTC 2.7 tape driver, all of
   these problems have gone away - no lockups, proper warning messages,
   and multi-volume backups are possible. I have not used 3.0e, so these
   bugs might be fixed there too.

Good Luck!
-- 
Steven C. Neighorn            !tektronix!{psu-cs,reed,ogccse}!qiclab!neighorn
Intel Corporation            "Where we BUILD the Star Fighters that defend the
Development Tools Operation      frontier against Xur and the Ko-dan Armada"
80960 Language Group            work: (503) 696-7264 / home: (503) 645-7015