8-track tape drives?

[Bobby Nansel and Shoshana Kaminsky]

About twenty years ago I bought a dual tape drive "mass" storage 
peripheral from a surplus outfit, United Products in Seattle.  It was 
for a long defunct personal computer of the '70s.  The computer (which 
I only ever saw in a few  ca. 1978 ads in Byte) was an 8080-based 
system, and I think it was billed as having color video graphics 
capability.  I don't remember the name of the company.  Anyway, the 
distinguishing characteristic of the system was the tape drive unit 
used modified 8-track tape decks.  That's right, 8-track *audio* 
cartridges, the kind people make so much fun of these days.

The drive was housed in a blue metal enclosure with a black vacu-formed 
plastic bezel for the two "drives."  It had a DB-25 connector on the 
back, though it definitely wasn't a standard RS232 interface.  As I 
recall, the tape head assembly in each drive had four read/write coils, 
and it could move to one of two positions, up or down, thus giving 
eight tracks total.  Presumably this was to decrease the "seek" time.

I managed to trace through the circuit well enough to figure out how to 
write and read back serial data on tape, at about 2400 bps, as I 
recall.  I had some fun hooking it up to a C64 in the lab to prove the 
thing was actually working.  I kept threatening a co-worker that I was 
going to write a driver for the monstrosity to use on the lab's CP/M 
machines.  He had just built a Slicer, a 80186 SBC that was popular for 
a few years in the mid-eighties, and the thought of such a kludge 
horrified him.  Heh.

I foolishly sold the dual tape drive and all my notes at a Seattle 
Robotics Society auction sometime around 1989.  I've done some poking 
around on the web recently, but I have found zip about this machine.  
Has anyone ever seen one of these tape drives?  I actually have a 
project that, perversely, requires something like this.

-RLN