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