Yeah, too early to be QIC (also, to run this, you needed a VS-100, and to run a VS-100 you needed a VAX 11/7xx to put the controller card in, and basically all of those had 9-track tape drives.)
QIC was launched in 1972.
sure, but from actually using this hardware in the mid-80s and later, labs had QIC drives once they had suns, which was rather later on, and I don't think I ever saw a QIC drive on a VAX (a bunch of weird 9 track drives including a top loader, sure.) And microvaxes tended to have (non-functional) TK-50/TK-70 "linear" tapes (ancient ancestors of DLT)...
I've seen plenty of QIC drives on HP/Apollo systems, I've used them on HP 9000 series and on Suns from that era, they were quite wide-spread at that time.
Could be a QIC tape drive, but likely to be reel given it's a Wang.
QIC-24 was nine-track in a handy container - a bit like a compact cassette for computers.
My 386 machine had a QIC-24 in 1987, I got a copy of X10R4 from my local university.
Some QIC format most likely - a fairly sturdy aluminium-backed cartridge containing two spools and a pressure roller with which the quarter-inch tape (hence the name, Quarter Inch tape Cartridge) was pressed against the tape head.
“Drop by my office with a tape” probably would’ve referred to DECtape (TK50), the ancestor of DLT. That and QIC-24 were the sorts of tapes one would carry between offices in those days; TK50 was extremely common in the DEC world and QIC-24 was used pretty much everywhere else.
9 track was the default; at least that's how we got it from MIT for our VAX, Sun and Sequent machines. QIC for the workstation class machines, tho I don't recall if we got QICs from MIT or someone copied it from the 9-tracks locally. I used a QIC to put it on the Sun 3/160 I used.