[Offer] "TXPLUS" - rare, obscure tape backup software

dmitrybrant

I recently stumbled on this software while recovering data from old tape cartridges, and noticed that it's nowhere to be found on the web, except for a single clipping in an InfoWorld magazine from 1993.

So, here it is!

It seems to be a proprietary tool made by a company called "Interpreter Backup Systems", and bundled with their "TapeXchange" tape drive, which is a regular QIC tape drive inside a proprietary enclosure that connects over the parallel port.

SomeGuy

Thanks. Can you provide an image dumped with WinImage or a similar tools, and a label scan or readable photo? Thanks.

dmitrybrant

Unfortunately this didn't come from an original floppy disk; it was part of a larger tape backup, where the contents of the tape included this tool (i.e. the tool that was used to write the tape itself). I'm not sure a floppy image will be obtainable. Apologies if it's not usable in this form.

SomeGuy

Thanks for the explanation about where it came from.

Out of curiosity, how did you read the tape without the software? I'd guess the tape and content was compatible with some similar drive?

dmitrybrant

Oh yes, the tape itself is a regular QIC-150 cartridge, which were very common at the time, and I dumped its raw contents in Linux using a standard old QIC drive, obtaining a binary image that I was able to reverse-engineer.

The raw image wasn't any kind of "standard" format that I've seen, which was the first indication that it was written using an unknown proprietary tool. But the contents were encoded in a straightforward manner, with files and directories written in succession, aligned on sector boundaries, so it was easy enough to reverse-engineer.