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This rack is part of a system which includes an 8/I and several other peripherals.
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An H960 rack containing TC08 DECtape controller, indicator panel, a single TU56 dual-DECtape drive, and the power supplies to run them. It's in absolutely perfect condition - like it was turned-off yesterday and only left the factory a year or two before that! The actual dates on most of the components are 1970.




Rear view of the rack showing 2 x 783 power supplies, and an 853-F power controller in the bottom. There's also a 716 power supply in the top of the frame, which powers the indicator panel. The hour meter on the 853-F reads 58,000!




Closeup of the TU56 and indicator panel. The label on the right DECtape reads 'OS/8', the left is custom software for the system it was running.




The guts of the TU56.




The TC08 controller - a TC08 Rev. J, to be precise - according to the label, which also gives a build date 10/10/70.




Wire side of the TC08 backplane.




The 783 power supplies, and 853-F power controller.


The other two racks which make up the system:




The reason there's a big hole in 'Rack 1' above is that there was at one time a pdp-8/e in it! I presume the RK05 was hooked-up to this.

The interconnections are interesting. The paddles on the TC08 positive bus cables have writing which indicates they plug into the DM04. The DM04 is connected to the backplane identified as 'CPU I/O' (I haven't been able to find a DEC identifier on this, but it seems to consist mostly of M650 and M507 modules). The CPU I/O backplane isn't connected to anything else in the rack. The DW08A connects to the PT08 (which in turn connects to the backplane identified as 'Celco'), and to the CDW08 ('Celco-modified DW08'???). Once I retrieve the 8/I rack, I'll hopefully be able to figure where that plugs in!

One thing I do seem to recall being told; the reason the 8/e was at one time in the 'Rack 1' was that the 8/I had failed, and the 8/e was installed as a replacement CPU...


The most useful web resource for this stuff is Al Kossow and his Bitsavers documentation - http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/dectape/
David Gesswein also has good stuff - http://www.pdp8.net/tu56/tu56.shtml