Using the Stacker

The stacker is an 8mm tape drive that has 10 bays where you can "store" 8mm tapes. Unfortunately, there is only one drive so you can only read/write one tape at a time. The advantage of the stacker is that it allows you to read/write multiple tapes with one job without physically replacing tapes. Below we will write the contents of some data in the silo to an 8mm tape placed in bay 5(from the top) of the stacker.

The following example gives stacker specific commands (branches commands) that are needed to write 8mm tapes using the SLD stacker. This example is taken from Tony Johnson's page How to take the SLD data home with you. If you don't already know how to use the regular 8mm drives, I suggest you check out Tony's page.

$ define intape slda1$mka100: $ branches unload intape $ branches set position/label=mytape 5 $ branches load/pos=5 intape mytape $ mount/foreign intape mytape $ run disk$sld_usr0:[tonyj.vaxtap]einit_tv MYTAPE $ ida def copy write using inlist rectype * enddef open read GREATDATA open write intape:MYTAPE.filename;1 go 0 close infile close outfile

Warning

The above example has been tested and does indeed work as of 5/2/96. It may not work when you try it in the future.

John Coller 2 May 1996