carry-tape flames

[Chris Lindblad <CJL@reagan.ai.mit.edu>]

    Date: Fri,  2 Oct 87 17:25:58 EDT
    From: David Vinayak Wallace <GUMBY@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>

    I find it somewhat bizarre that I would advocate anything which is
    associated with unix, but...

    The unix "tar" program gets this right.

    There are several misfeatures of tar which could be fixed, but in
    general theability to "copy this tree to tape and let me re-graft it
    elsewhere" works great.

I second Gumby's suggestion, and go even further.  I'd love lispms to be able
to read and write tar tapes.  Not a subset of the format.  Not a superset of
the format.  Not something that's better.  Just tar tapes.  Doing the tar
format exactly would be much better than improving on it, or inventing another
format.

I'm curious about another thing.  Happily, 9-track tapes are standardized
that (at the level of just blocks bytes) they can be written on one
manufacturer's machine and read on another's.  Is this true of those 3M
cartridge tapes?