Assume the IBM guys have this setup in some dusty basement in upstate New York.
This is a 2 part question. What is the best method for attempting to read this mag tape? That’s the main question. Second, what is the probability of success here? Assume the tape was kept in a climate controlled home.
He's very easy to reach on Twitter, @textfiles.
I believe the presenter's tape was also from an IBM 360. I guess maybe, if the rig the presenter used to read his tape still exists, this might be of use to the poster. The presenter had a tape from his college days in the 1960s, stored in less than ideal environmental conditions, that he wanted to read.
The presentation explores using software to digitize and analyze the analog signal generated by the flux transitions on the tape to reconstruct the data. Essentially, it's moving the digital portion of the tape drive into a software domain and doing signal processing. Software-defined radio kind of stuff, to some extent. Very similar to the efforts to preserve floppy disks (which are kinda like tape drives for tiny circular tapes, basically) by recording the flux transitions and processing them.
The presentation gets into some work applying these techniques to reconstruct tapes recovered from the Whirlwind project, too.
search: >'magnetic tape restoration'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='magnetic tape restorati...>
The chances of reading the data will depend on several factors;
1. The tape-stock (base and binder stability), the stored temperature, humidity and magnetic field exposure.
2. A working and aligned reader.
The IBM System/360 (S/360) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360
Is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7 1964, and delivered between 1965 & 1978.
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Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC ) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC
Is an eight-bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems.
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Also See;
search: >'NASA call for Moon tapes'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='NASA call for Moon tape...>
I have never used these guys, OnTrack(0), but they claim to do 9-track recovery.
Everything we did in the industry for decades lived on 9-track tapes. EBCDIC headers are a standard feature of SEG-Y output datasets.
Here is one who deals with geophysical data, Data Strategies Interchange(1).
[0] (https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/tape-services)
[1] (https://go-dsi.com/seismic-data-transcription/)
Good luck. Sounds like a fun project. I wrote a SEGD/SEGY reader for geophysical data a long time ago using tcl/tk. It was surprisingly easy. It used data from disk files though. I got rid of my SCSI 8mm and DLT drives a long time ago and went to pure disk IO. No more issues spinning tapes after that. In the industry though we did have some really good tape reading/writing/checking routines. Haven't done that since the mid-90's myself.
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zvse/6.2?topic=SSB27H_6.2.0/fa2m...
You can bypass default label assumptions and label processing using JCL directives like BLP, NL, etc.
When I was in mainframe operations and at times ran the Production Control Center (triage), I rescued some systems from being rerun due to clobbered labels by altering JCL.
If he does not have a machine capable of reading the tapes in his house/museeum, he will know someone who has.
(and as a bonus, the recovery might end up as a entertaining youtube video)
https://www.marianne-bellotti.com
I do not have contact info for her, and she has no idea who I am, so you're on your own...
Otherwise you might be able to build your own tape reader. You could probably make it a lot smaller and simpler than the original machines since throughput wouldn't really be an issue. Still it would probably be quite an engineering project.
One of them ran in 1999, at least, but they've been in the barn since.
rebuilding that to functional might be harder than making some hacked up sensor to run tape through.
I’m still working for the man, though.
I recall a time that I wrote a program that called for a tape mount and a file to be read where this file spanned 2 volumes. There was a 3270 terminal next to the tape reader. After the job is submitted, I was amazed at the velocity of the read.
The all time favorite raised floor data center story: I worked for a commercial software vendor back in the day where sufficient physical security for the data center was a lock on the building door, but no locks to the raised tile floor area.
One day I walked through the doors of the data center and everything was covered in a fine ash-like powder. Another employee brought their young child with him to the data center. This child pressed the red button labeled “Haylon Dump”.
I was told by the operators on watch that everyone was lucky to find their way out safely.
New locks were installed the next and badge swipes were required for entry.
Amazingly, all the hardware mostly survived.
2) is there a way to avoid forcing physical contact with rubber capstans as you attempt to pass it over a magnetic play head? Is there an alternative magnetic sensing technology you can use to extract the data vs a proximity based typical tape playback head?