sun 88780 on ebay

[Paul Koning]

> 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