3420 tape drive

[Rich Alderson]

From: Pmungai Njau via cctalk
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2018 6:06 AM

> Am looking for the above tape to read and covert some old tapes from
> ebcidic to ASCII format. How can I get the tapes in Kenya.

Hi, Paul,

You do not need an IBM tape drive to convert from EBCDIC to ASCII; all
tape drives are agnostic about the meanings of the 8-bit data frames on
the media.  Data conversion is a function of the operating system or
utility used to read/write the data.

Your best option is to read the tapes as raw 8-bit bytes with any working
9-track tape drive into a data file and then do the data conversion using
a tool such as (GNU) dd.

                                                                Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:RichA at LivingComputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/