Installation and Operating Instructions

For your entertainment, we offer the OpenVMS VAX DECtape driver. If
you're interested and have a Unibus VAX, find yourself a TC-11
controller and TU56 driver and plug them in. There is no setup
involved; CSR address and interrupt vector are hard-wired in the
TC-11. The driver has been tested on OpenVMS V5 and runs as best as we
can tell. It has never been run on V6, but it should not be affected
by any of the V6 changes. It is rumored that the driver would also
work on a Q-bus VAX, connected via an Able Qnivertor board. However,
to the best of our knowledge this has never been tried.

This kit includes driver executables built for OpenVMS VAX V5 and V6,
named DTDRIVER_V5.EXE and DTDRIVER_V6.EXE, respectively. To install
simply copy the appropriate driver to SYS$LOADABLE_IMAGES:DTDRIVER.EXE.
If you want, you can rebuild the driver from source by invoking
BUILD.COM. To load the driver (once you've plugged in the hardware),
simply invoke SYSGEN and tell it to AUTOCONFIGURE ALL. The DECtape is
in the autoconfigure tables! You will have to edit the driver, however,
to set the number of units that it configures, because there is no
reliable way for the driver to interrogate the controller for available
units. Look for the DEFUNITS declaration under the DPTAB macro and set
the number of units you want to support. The driver supports 4 units as
shipped.

The driver supports all the standard disk I/O functions, so you can
INIT and MOUNT file-structured DECtapes. Or better yet, get hold of
VAX-11 RSX and a copy of the old FLX, and you can read your old DOS-11
DECtapes. Unfortunately it does not support formatting, so you'll need
a supply of preformatted tapes. Also, there's no 18 bit mode so
there's no way to read all those old TOPS-10 tapes. Maybe in a
future version...

The kit also includes a random DECtape exercisor called TCRANDOM. To
run it, just invoke or submit TCRANDOM.COM. For a real show, submit as
many TCRANDOM jobs as you have drives and watch the overlap seek logic
work!