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Youngsters under age 50 can ignore this message. It's only for old-timers. If an old tape reel from the 1980s has a label on it that reads, "Memorex Cubic 6250 BPI SuperReel" and a typed tag saying "MSU Permanent Tap ID Number B 577" does that mean it was created at the Computer Lab, as it was then called? A former faculty member is interested in having a data recovery company try to recover files from it. I've run the possibility past the folks at werecoverdata.com (which I used a couple of years ago to recover data from a crashed disk) and they didn't outright laugh at me . But we need to supply information about the tape. Maybe 6250bpi will suffice, but maybe other information about the system that would have been used to write the data would be useful. Does anyone remember the systems that would have been used to write such tapes? When the faculty member brought this up, I first thought she was talking about a tape that I remember writing for her when she moved to Australia back in the mid 80s. But I think our tape drive was a 1600 bpi thing. I can't remember the model of the tape drive, but it was purchased with an early VAX-11/780 computer. Googling has led me to mentions of a model TU81, which is a model name I sort-of recognize, but ours might have been older than that. But it probably doesn't matter, because now this doesn't look like one of ours. I haven't seen the tape at first hand. It's still in Australia or some such place. Any information would be appreciated, including any stories you know about recovering data from tapes that old. John Gorentz