Brief time away from the city can do one's psyche a world of good.
[size=8pt]The magtape continues to give over-run errors, although there is a strong correlation between the problem rate and guvax's load--it is possible to get flawless reads when things are quiet. The whole TE16 unit, power supply issues notwithstanding (or are they?) is extremely old as such things go and, frankly, was poorly designed to begin with.
The result is a very demanding device that absolutely must have immediate response from the host computer at all times. This is almost impossible to guarantee in a timesharing system. Looking through some of Deek's research notebooks from 30 years ago reveals a lot: even the people who originally implemented the magtape system had all kinds of trouble getting it to behave. The problems appear to have gotten progressively worse with the internal rearrangements of 4.3BSD-Reno Net2 compared to the old 3BSD distro they had to work with back then, sooooo...
I'm going to try rooting one of the unused Zoology department KL50's this weekend and sticking the magtape on it, where it can have the full attention of that box. The details of this, especially the transfer of data to/from guvax, have yet to be worked out (probably end up being one of the most bloody insane things this Sysop will ever do, but hey, let's live dangerously.) More on this sometime next week.
And can anybody tell me who started that "Things that Annoy You" thread? Hint: it wasn't jfrancispastirchak, although the way he's been going on you'd almost think he had...