Dealing with 4mm and 8mm tapes

DDS drives do a very good job of reading older lower-density 4mm tapes. And DDS drives seem to be pretty durable. There were a couple of oddball 8mm formats for digital data very early on but it's very unlikely you've got tapes in those odd formats. What you have will probably be readable in an Exabyte 8200 (should you find a working one!) or 8500/8505/8505XL (far more reliable). An AIT drive (also uses 8mm-style cartridges) may or may not be backwards compatible with the earlier Exabyte formats, I'm not too up on the details. If the tapes are intended for digital data storage they'll generally be better than videotapes pressed into digital use, at least for 8mm. I never was able to tell the difference between "computer" and "audio" 4mm tapes in everyday use. As long as you don't have to write, only read, I think the Exabyte 85xx series can read the 8200 density stuff OK. There are 85xx variants with compression and variants without compression, and they don't necessarily switch transparently from one mode to the other (caused much confusion for me 15 years ago!). Tim. /