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.