henry (05/20/82)
There is good news and bad news. The good news is that removing the bus repeater seems to have cleared up the interaction between the magtape and the DZs -- or at least reduced its frequency greatly. The bad news is that we do need that bus repeater, and a concerted attempt is going to have to be made to figure out what's going on. One earlier hypothesis (some sort of design mistake in the Plessey DZs) is now less likely: this time one of the terminals on the Dec DZ was observed to hang during tests. Anyway, we are now running without the bus repeater (cross your fingers) so the people anxiously waiting to use the magtape can get their work done. While I was at it, I finally removed the old card reader interface from the 44, since the card reader lives on Zodiac1 these days.