Aug 10th, 2025:  Using 'tar' with actual tapes

My earliest concept of 'Unix' as a child growing up in the 80s was
certainly vague, but central to that notion was the idea of magnetic
tape media -- as in:  if I heard of a place that 'ran Unix', I'd
picture cabinets of tape decks or even reel-to-reel tapes.  Whatever
"Unix" was, it had tapes.  (And it sounded pretty badass to me)

But while my Unix (Linux) experience was early, (My Linux flex is
that I installed Slackware from floppy sets onto my 486 PC) I never
really had occasion to actually use a tape drive with my Linux or BSD
boxes through the years.  My only real, personal use of a tape drive
was with a 80MB DAT drive on an older DOS PC.  My later professional
use of DLT tape storage was mostly on Windows Servers.

So perhaps you'll appreciate my excitement at filling out my Unix
bingo card this week after getting Jesse Peterson's IOSCSITape kext
to build for Tiger.  I had been forced to use Retrospect Express on
my Beige G4, but now that I have a raw SCSI device node for my DDS2
drive, I'm finally able to use 'tar' (the 't'ape 'ar'chiver) to back
up directly to my (whopping!) 4GB tapes.

Life is good.  Unix has tapes.
.