DEC Magnetic Tape Drive Tester

This Magnetic Tape Drive Tester was donated on 1/26/23 by and ex-DEC Field Service person, Frank Pascucci. It is dedicated to testing the TU10, TU20, and TU30 tape drives used on the PDP-8, PDP-9, and PDP-10 computers. These tape drives connect to the tape controller using a bus that would allow up to 7 tape drives to be connected to a single controller. The tester replaces the controller for offline testing.

We don't have any documentation on the tester, and it is not mentioned in any of the tape drive documentation. The RICM has a TU20 tape drive on the PDP-9, so we can try it out and see what it does.

The circuitry is very simple, so we could reverse engineer the design.