Re: Old Magnetic Tapes

From: Bill Gunshannon (bill_at_gw5.cs.uofs.edu)
Date: 12/17/03 

Date: 17 Dec 2003 13:29:35 GMT

In article <broquh113re@enews4.newsguy.com>,
        healyzh@aracnet.com writes:
> David J. Dachtera <djesys.nospam@neoasrptahmlnionwk.net> wrote:
>> The density may turn out to be the biggest challenge. Could be 800BPI,
>
> How common was it to write 800BPI tapes on DEC HW, especially in the
> mid-to-late 80's? I've got a customer that wants me to retrieve some data
> off a bunch of 9-Tracks once I verify our drive works. Our drive only
> supports 1600/6250.

I would suspect that any taqpe old enough to have been written at
800BPI is likely to be unreadable by this point in time anyway. I
have had much newer tapes that have passedc this point already.

> What's going to be interesting is that I don't know yet
> if they were written on a PDP-11, VAX, or Unix system.

A minor nit, the first two are not exclusive of that last one. I am
happily running Ultrix on both VAXen and PDP-11's. :-)

bill 

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
bill@cs.scranton.edu     |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>

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