seek on raw magtape

[Henry Spencer]

> The reason you cannot randomly access tapes for writing...

Who said anything about randomly accessing tapes for writing?  If you
study my initial posting, you'll see that what I want is to read some,
back up slightly, and then start writing from there.  No random-access
writes are involved.

Random-access writes are indeed impossible unless you're really confident
about media integrity.  (It's been done, at low densities with good tapes,
but I wouldn't try it at 6250!)  Random seeking followed by sequential
writing isn't the same thing.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry