recovering cartridge tapes (was: Tek fiches found! (was: Looking for Tektronix 4051 programs...))

In article <BLU145-W4E5759E0F6332DE691D00BABD0 at phx.gbl>, Randy Dawson <rdawson16 at hotmail.com> writes: As I understand it the DC300/DC100 cartridges are a linear encoding format (according to Wikipedia, anyway). I've been thinking that we need to create a device for reading these cartridges that is similar to the 7/9-track device at the Computer History Museum. We should be able to take a read head from an existing drive and create a mechanism for slowly and gently moving the tape over the read head and digitize the resulting analog signals for later signal processing. Is there any sort of detailed writeup of the design of the 7/9-track machine at CHM? If we build a similar device for these cartrdige tapes we can avoid the capstan and drive belt problems and recover the data in a secure manner. I've also been wondering about building a circuit that creates fake analog signals to the existing tape drive circuitry so that you can "play back" the archived tapes into an existing device without having to worry about physical media. First I think its more important to create a device for safely archiving the media, though. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>