On 7/7/17 12:08 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>> And I'm moving towards flux-level archiving and away from using >> stock tape transports. >> >> But then, I've been saying that for 15+ years now and haven't done it. > > It would be great to have that capability, after the company that had it > before seemingly vanished. Better yet if you can handle not just plain 7 and > 9 track 1/2 inch tape but also other formats. 3/4 inch tape would come to > mind (DECtape and friends). There's one inch tape (CDC 626) though I'm not > sure if any has been preserved. There's 1/2 inch 10 track tape > (Electrologica X1 and others). > > Stuff like error correction data makes sense for such low level capture. > It's not so obvious if you're working with a conventional tape transport, > which simply tells you "read error, you're SOL" if the checksums are no good. > I guess you've tried contacting John then about the Xelctrologica tapes? He sent me a prototype drive with 18-track (IBM 3480) head that I still haven't gotten to work. Most of the code lives on a Virtex FPGA board with the A/D converters attached and he never gave me the source or adequate instructions on how to talk to it This only works because the 3480 and 90 still used 1/2" width tape. DECtape recovery hasn't been a problem. It's pretty rugged stuff. I'm much less hopeful on any other parallel tape formats, since there are so few and the desire to recover any of that has been low.
