Subject: 09877-10002

From: Bullock Doyle R Civ WRALC/MAILPB <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat Jul 26 21:40:28 2003

We at Robins AF BASE are in need of a copy of a 09877-10002 Tape Binary
Duplicator Tape. I just did a Google search for this part number and
recieved the following. Do you still have these? Any help would be
appreciated. Thanks, Doyle Bullock

Eureka! 
Joe [email-masked]  <mailto:cctech%40classiccmp.org>
Sun Feb 9 16:04:30 2003 
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  Well I didn't find the Holy Grail but this is close!  I went to a hamfest
today and in a box of junk I found the operating program for the HP 9877
Mass Memory unit!  That's the box that has up to four tape drives installed
and was used to mass duplicate HP 9825 tapes at the HP factory. The 9877 is
a rare bird and was only offered to the public for one year (1979 IIRC) but
I've got two of the 9877s, Tony D has one and NASA KSC has one but NO ONE
has been able to locate the operating program for it till now.  The tape
APPEARS to be in good condition but you know how HP tapes are :-(   

  The full name of the tape is "Duplicator 9825A/9877" and it's part number
is 09877-10002.

   Other INTERESTING finds (in the same box no less!) were a new DC-300A
tape (as used on the IBM 5100 and Tektronix 4051), a Plot 50 tape and Plot
50 Backup tape and an Alignment tape. All three are for the Tektronix 4051
computer.

   Wahoo! A good ClassiComp day!

   Joe

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---

From: Joe <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed Jul 30 22:29:59 2003

Hi Doyle,

   You or someone else from WR called me a couple of months ago about this
same problem. IIRC the problem that you had was that the rubber drive belt
in your tape had failed. I found someone that says he can repair that. He
says that he will try to repair it if you will send him your tape. Contact
me direct you you want to attempt this and I'll give you his contact
information. If you do get it fixed you need to IMMEDIATEY make plenty of
backups of it. I have two 9877s, NASA at KSC has one and there's one more
in England and none of us have the software tape to operate them.  I think
I have a tape for the 9877 that I found a couple of months ago but I know
it has a bad drive belt and I haven't done anything with it. I'd also be
surprised if the tape itself is still good. The HP tape systems are
notorious for (1) bad drive belts in the tapes, (2) bad tapes (the magnetic
media falls off) and (3) bad tape drives (the drive wheels turn to glop).
For example, I bought a sealed CASE of brand new sealed HP brand tapes a
couple of yuears ago and it turned out that almost half of them were bad
right out of the case. In another test, I found 13 HP tapes that were still
working and I started using them. Most failed immediately ( within a few
hours), a few more failed over the next couple of days and the last one
failed within a week. I also found a NIB tape drive a couple of weeks ago.
It was still in a plastic bag inside of a sealed cardbaord box but the
drive wheel had literally melted and all of it had dripped off of the drive
capstan. I strongly suggest that you look into disk drive systems for your
9825s and abandon the tape drives. The drive systems are widely available
in the surplus market and are cheap. In fact, since you're a government
agency you could get them for nothing from other government agencies that
are surplussing them. I would recommend the HP 9121 S or D disk drives.
They're small, reliable and use standard 720k 3.5" floppy disks. The S
drive is a single drive and the D drives have two drives in them. I thnk
you'll need one of the option ROMs in order to use the floppy dirves but
those are also available surplus and again you could probably get all you
need from other agencies for free. There are a LOT of 9825s out there.

    Joe