I have played around with Caps-11 on Simh and I never played around with
its innards but it's UI is very similar to DOS-11.
Ray
On Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 7:49 PM Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
 
  On Mar 31, 2020, at 5:45 PM, Clem Cole <clemc
at ccc.com> wrote:
 I've forgotten to be honest -- IIRC, no formatting was needed like a 
traditional tape drive.   But it is possible we may have had a program to
 do the formatting and I've just forgotten it. I do remember that it was a
 very simple, saturation scheme. We had a scope on the read electronics of
 the TA11 and decoded it all.   NRZ style, 8-bit bytes, no parity, fixed
 blocks with a prefix and suffix - serial encoding (unlike a 7/9-track) -
 which is why the capacity is so low.
 Was it really RT-11?  I don't remember that it had TA11 support, and given
 that it's like a magtape, not block addressable, it's hard to see how it
 could be the system device.
 DEC had an early software package called CAPS-11.  I know nothing about it
 other than the name and the fact that it was there to support the TA-11.
         paul