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installation was more than overnight. once it was up and running, it was remarkably responsive, in the short run, but would invariably need to do a lot of seeking to launch any app. The sort of thing if you are sitting nearby you could give it some input every couple minutes.

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For some fringe use cases one could drop a readily installed (and defragmented!) OS image to the tape and boot it up. I've only had some floppy tape drives and parallel-port attached Ditto. They didn't support random access, or at least I never had a driver that could do that.

I seem to recall some vendor (HP?) selling external tape drives at some point that supported bootable, bare metal Windows restore from tape.

I believe it worked by supplying the recovery software as a bootable ISO image in ROM on the drive and emulating a bootable (USB? SCSI?) CD-ROM drive at boot.

DAT tapes presented as disk drivers, sector addressable. and you can dump a .iso to a disk to make it bootable, so sounds right.

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