> On Nov 1, 2025, at 8:07 PM, Michael Thompson via cctalk
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Maybe Dave’s setup would work best because the reading software would not
> need to be concerned with the format of the tape data.
>
>> On Nov 1, 2025, at 4:08 PM, David Gesswein via cctalk
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Looks like you have closer options. If they get too many read errors I have
>> a
>> setup which digitizes analog signals and processes them which may be able
>> to recover tapes. I'm in MD.
Is Dave's setup a DECtape drive, with 10 tracks on 3/4 inch width?
Analog capture would be a great option for old tapes. It's likely there will
be tapes that don't read cleanly with standard controllers, but could be
recovered with analog capture and good DSP.
And yes, it would of course deal with odd formats. Then again, reading PDP-10
tapes on a PDP-11 is easy; RT-11 has a standard utility that does this, using
the controller's standard "read all" command. I'm not sure how a PDP-8 would
cope, given that the standard PDP-8 blocksize is quite different.
One thing an analog capture system would do that DECtapes would have trouble
with is reading LINCtape, because RALL assumes (I believe) standard DECtape
mark track codes and LINCtape has an entirely different mark track.
paul
