What is the 'real' tape length

[David J. Camp]

Spots,

A while ago I inquired on sun-spots about the real vs. apparent length of
a tape.  What I had noticed is that the length written on the tape's label
(600') was less that expected by dump.  I got several good answers, and
this is a summary.

The length of tape expected by dump is the real length of the tape times
the number of tracks minus some factor for inter-record gaps.  If you use
/dev/rst8 you get 9 tracks, but if you use /dev/rst0 you get only 4
tracks.

-David-

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