29 Jan
2019
29 Jan
'19
11:45 a.m.
On Jan 29, 2019, at 2:31 PM, John Foust via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
...
I posted about his a few years ago. See below.
...
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.
The design described by John Bordynuik seems like a good one, and would be easier still by
now. A Beaglebone with FPGA daughtercard is probably plenty for the signal processing
part.
A 30+ track head to deal with a variety of tape formats would be ideal. Not just 7 and 9
but real oddballs -- there are some 10 track 1/2 inch tape formats around. Not to mention
that one could read DECtape that way, even if the head is only 1/2 inch wide (some loss of
redundancy in that case).
Are the heads that Bordynuik mentioned still around?
paul