Want a 9-track repair business?

At 02:04 PM 10/5/2011, I wrote: This fellow called me again today, out of the blue. In the year ahead, he hopes to sell his building and down-size, focusing on the repair of smaller drives and dumping the bulk of his 9-track business. It sounds like he has a bunch of 88780-class 9-tracks that'll go to the scrapper. He wishes there was a modern replacement for reading old tapes. Seven-track and nine-track. Speed is not an issue; data recovery is. He says hardly anyone wants to write to tapes any more. A simple transport, a flexible read-head, a bunch of software, right? Call it TapeFerret. He mentioned another company that makes a modern 7-track drive and sells it for $50K+ to the seismic end of the oil industry. And that's where his 9-track business is today: much is for the oil industry mostly outside the USA. They want to read old seismic data and reprocess it using new techniques to find more oil. Another more profitable business is fixing more recent tape drives for IBM mainframes. Another chunk is a few specific models of 9-track that work with old Alcatel phone switches. There's still some equipment and processes that require a real drive and that does not work with tape emulators. I offered to hook him up with buyers for any still-working units he doesn't want to keep when he downsizes his business. I also offered to connect him with the professional classic computer curators who might need his help when it comes to reading or restoring old tape media and devices. - John