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QIC Tape and Tandberg streamers

QIC (Quarter-Inch Cratridge) was an early standad of tape cartridges. It survived to mid-90s without significant changes in construction (characteristical belt mechanism), only track density increased allowing to store up to 500MB of uncompressed data. Some machines, especially older Sun or DEC ones, used QIC tapes to boot OS installation. I have a few QIC streamers and tapes.
To write or read a whole tape, head assembly was targeted to a track first. Then, the tape was wound. After it reached the end marked by dots readable by optical sensor, the head was re-positioned to the next track and the tape was wound backwards.

To get more info about early QIC streamers, see my Shinwa SDX-80 unit.

There were other mechanisms using QIC tapes, see this picture of HP Colorado streamer from 1989.

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