Myths about tape block sizes

[Henry Spencer]

In article <986 at brchh104.bnr.ca> dan at breeze.bellcore.com (Daniel Strick) writes:
>The 63 kb limit for mag tape is actually arbitrary ...

Actually, no:  it came from tape controllers with 16-bit count registers,
which were still relatively common not long ago.  (The Xylogics 472 that a
lot of Sun 3s shipped with has a 16-bit count, for example.)

Agreed that it is silly to impose such limits on hardware that doesn't
need them, like properly-implemented SCSI controllers.

"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry at zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry