11–20 of 34 posts
https://www.marianne-bellotti.com
I do not have contact info for her, and she has no idea who I am, so you're on your own...
Otherwise you might be able to build your own tape reader. You could probably make it a lot smaller and simpler than the original machines since throughput wouldn't really be an issue. Still it would probably be quite an engineering project.
I think you should reach out to Jason Scott over at the Internet Archive. He's been involved with helping people get old stuff off of old media before and if he doesn't have the tech and know how, chances are high he knows who to ask. He's very easy to reach on Twitter, @textfiles.
Great tip, thank you. Easy is relative. Lucky for me, I have kids who can get me going with a twitter account.
I'm guessing that would be one of the old reel to reel tapes. I think the hardest part (assuming the tape is intact) would be finding a working tape reader. From pictures I've seen I think those were real beasts, in cabinets as large as the mainframe itself. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA is one of the few places that might have one. Otherwise you might be able to build your own tape reader. You coul…
One of them ran in 1999, at least, but they've been in the barn since.
rebuilding that to functional might be harder than making some hacked up sensor to run tape through.
If he does not have a machine capable of reading the tapes in his house/museeum, he will know someone who has.
(and as a bonus, the recovery might end up as a entertaining youtube video)
I believe the presenter's tape was also from an IBM 360. I guess maybe, if the rig the presenter used to read his tape still exists, this might be of use to the poster. The presenter had a tape from his college days in the 1960s, stored in less than ideal environmental conditions, that he wanted to read.
The presentation explores using software to digitize and analyze the analog signal generated by the flux transitions on the tape to reconstruct the data. Essentially, it's moving the digital portion of the tape drive into a software domain and doing signal processing. Software-defined radio kind of stuff, to some extent. Very similar to the efforts to preserve floppy disks (which are kinda like tape drives for tiny circular tapes, basically) by recording the flux transitions and processing them.
The presentation gets into some work applying these techniques to reconstruct tapes recovered from the Whirlwind project, too.
I'm guessing that would be one of the old reel to reel tapes. I think the hardest part (assuming the tape is intact) would be finding a working tape reader. From pictures I've seen I think those were real beasts, in cabinets as large as the mainframe itself. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA is one of the few places that might have one. Otherwise you might be able to build your own tape reader. You coul…
I have a couple of 4U 9 track tape drives with centronics SCSI interfaces. Pulled from 90s Sun gear from ex Federal deployment. Government stuck with tape for a long time. One of them ran in 1999, at least, but they've been in the barn since. rebuilding that to functional might be harder than making some hacked up sensor to run tape through.
This probably isn't going to help the poster specifically but it's an excuse to share a good presentation from Vintage Computer Fest West 2020 re: magnetic tape restoration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKvwjYwvN2U I believe the presenter's tape was also from an IBM 360. I guess maybe, if the rig the presenter used to read his tape still exists, this might be of use to the poster. The presenter had a tape from his…