My speculation would be that TU58 did not add anything of value or
convenience to these systems.
I used Ultrix-11, V7M, Venix in this era. My recollection is that in
most cases to build these systems and patch them, you needed regular
access to 800/1600 BPI tape. Given this relatively standard media, the
addition of a smaller, slower, proprietary secondary tape media would at
best be a low priority. Throw in the raise of floppy media, then
Ethernet, it becomes even less so. Also this was a fixed block type
device, so any use between different OS's would have required additional
utilities and/or OS support to transfer files.
We had TU58's in our VAX 11/750 and few computerized medical systems.
Only on the later did we ever use them to move data on a regular basis.
This was for research purposes as vendor had not made any other
arrangements for data offloading. The TU58's were in a small
semi-portable cabinet. Thus they could be added and removed quickly w/o
altering the qualification of the medical device.
Jerry
On 2/3/19 1:13 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
Here's a question for someone who has been around long enough to
remember.
Why did none of the available PDP-11 Unixes support the TU-58?
I have looked at Ultrix-11, V7M and BSD 2.11 (didn't try 2.9
but I suspect if it isn't in 2.11 it wasn't in 2.9) and none
of them had support for the TU-58. Seems to me it would have
been a rather simple device to handle as it ran over a serial
line.
bill
