Yes. it was possible to format the tape with 1K blocks and
have direct access (seek) to each block. mkproto was used
to create the file system image.
I could really execute a program off that file system
and the tape was rolling every time that it needed to page-in
something.
Mounting read-write was not practical because it needed
to keep atime uptodate (the "noaccesstime" option was
invented later).
Anyway, if you can create a tape block device (it
must support random-access to any block) then there is
no reason why you cannot use it for swap, or to mount
a file system. I doubt if that can be done efficiently
on newer tape systems, they are designed for streaming
and not to start and stop on a spot.
Itai
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