We also have the usual Unix utilities for talking to tape devices. Bama has different, specific names for each of its tape devices. Following that there is a number indicating which drive it is, then some optional letters indicating the desired behavior of the tape drive. If you want the drive to stay where it was when the last read or write finished, you must specify this. Of the other tape drives we have, number 2 is the 4mm drive, and numbers 0 and 1 are the 8mm drives.
Tapes can sometimes have a short file at the beginning that has information about the tape.
One important piece of information kept there is the name of the tape. Tape systems often process this label to make sure that the tape being mounted on the drive is the one being requested. The routines we have for reading tapes written on UA1VM can perform this translation. The exception to this is that we don't have a technique to read IBM binary tapes. To get help with this routine just type its name.