The obsolescence of either is enough to render your data unrecoverable. Physical media seems to die out sooner than file formats do simply because it's generally not too hard to keep a file format reader around in software. As you found with ImageMagick. Thank goodness for that at least.
I actually own an 8-bit paper tape reader, 110 baud, chunky mechanical thing with a big motor. The last time I used it to read tapes I cobbled together a 20mA current loop to RS-232 converter and transferred a bunch of data to floppies. If I wanted to use it today I'd like to have a 20mA current loop to Bluetooth interface but I don't imagine they are too plentiful. BTW, the last time I used that reader, I also had to write a DEC PDP-8e emulator to run the code on them. Some of the tapes are in RIM format and some in BIN, all with code from the late 1960s and early 1970s. 'Twas a gas to see the old FOCAL prompt again. On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Jostein Øksne <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think you should differentiate between media obsolence and file format > obsolence. -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
