Eric Bender wrote:
>
> At 12:59 PM 8/13/1998 -0600, Simonsen, Larry wrote:
> >I thought that the bpi was for bits per inch.  Check of glossary
> >confirms this.  So divide by 8.
>
> Yeah, but with 8 (9 with the parity bit) track tape, each byte or character
> is stored horizontally across the tape. So I don't think you need to divide
> by 8. (However, I don't know why I gave an example earlier of 6400BPI tape
> when the industry standard became 6250BPI - memory problem, I guess.)
>
Seems to me that one can't tell the capacity of a reel until one knows
the
physical record size normally the block size) because one has to allow
.6 (?) for each inter record gap.  Therefore for maximum capacity one
wants the physical record fixed as large as possible. At one time the
System limit for block size was about 32K, but I don't know if that
still
applies.

Nick D.