This photo shows two variants of QIC tape cartridges. The DECtape II was based on the form factor of the smaller cartridge and held 256 kilobytes of data. The DECtape emulated a disk drive and we used one as a boot device for a “portable” PDP-11/23 system. The thing was slow as molasses. Later versions of the QIC minicartridge held up to 120 megabytes of data.

The larger cartridge is a QIC-525 and, as its name implies held 525 megabytes on data on 26 tracks. The higher-capacity QIC-1350 was a 30 track device that could hold up to 1.35 gigabytes.