unreadable HP cartridges [now Magnasee]

At 12:15 AM 6/23/2005, Tom Jennings wrote: I think the magnetic approach will win because that's what you want to recover. In a race between a tape head and a relatively coarse layer of Mangasee, I think the tape head wins. You haven't established whether indefinite supplies of Magnasee are available. One google-bit yesterday suggested that the solvent was carbon tet. If someone still had a NOS case of it you might be in luck. Where the GNU Radio project wants to build a software radio, I think we also need a mostly-software VCR: something with a tape transport mechanism and a scanning digitizing head plus software to un-vertical, un-bit, un-helix, un-whatever the data plus signal analysis to bring it back to life. When you finish this project, please call - I have some old 8mm videotapes of the kids that went out of whack when the circa '92 Sony camcorder's surface-mount caps went south. Something's recorded on the tapes, the camcorder was able to play it back after it was recorded, but something else was drifting over time and later the tape wouldn't play. - John