Does anyone have a loose 3M/Georgens MCD-405 tape drive they could take board pictures and firmware dumps from, or any of the other MCD-40 series tape drives? I'm trying to figure out how similar it is to the one in the Apple 40mb tape drive.
I was asked about recovering some tapes from a Supermac 40mb tape/disk scsi box, and I am trying to figure out what tape drive I might need to do it. It appears it is Gammamat format, which would work with the Apple drives, and I wanted to compare the firmware from a non-Apple, so I started looking around for SCSI Gammamat drives. I also thought this would be useful knowledge for anyone trying to dump Symbolics XL-Series DC2040 tapes. One interesting thing mentioned in the Amiga BTNTape tape handler was they mention it was possible on some MCD series drives to format a blank DC2000 tape. They mention formatting with 2:1 interleave. Sadly, there were also people who said there was a tech manual available from Georgens on the series, but they didn't want to spend $50 for it. Georgens Industries was in San Diego and there still a few traces of them, but they are long gone at their last adr. I see that Chuck mentioned they were into the maintenance biz, Georgens was involved with DEI down there looking at his patents, and bought 3M's streamer tape line. Places like Weird Stuff have piles of the DC2000 floppy tape drives, need to do more digging to see if there are any SCSI ones around. Then, I have to redo the pinch roller. All the Apple tape drives have been dead for over ten years with rollers turned to orange goo.
