paper tape archiving

Al Kossow aek at bitsavers.org
Wed Jul 29 17:10:00 CDT 2020


On 7/29/20 2:14 PM, Bill Degnan via cctalk wrote:

> I am wondering if there any persons who have a systematic process they'd
> like to share for this kind of work.


Find a program that will display and capture binary data on the platform, operating
system and reader of your choice.

Surprisingly, there will be very few programs that do this well on what you'll be using
to read the tapes.

This is what I did for the thousands of Whirlwind paper tapes that I read

Make sure the date and time are correct on the machine

while(you have a tape to read){

	take a picture of the label
	capture the data, curse if you hit a splice that falls off, fix and redo until it's all read
	make up a name. if it's been cataloged use the catalog number, if not use <date><count of what you've read today>
	save the data
}
	read the pictures in and match them up with the data, note that the time on the pictures gives
          you a hint which labels went with which tape


This is essentially what I do for floppies as well

	



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