[EvanAnderson]

This probably isn't going to help the poster specifically but it's an excuse to share a good presentation from Vintage Computer Fest West 2020 re: magnetic tape restoration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKvwjYwvN2U

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.

[tgflynn]

Thanks, that's an interesting talk. It certainly makes sense to do as much of the signal processing in digital as possible but you still need a functioning analog front-end and their approach required access to an at least partially working 9 track tape drive, which I don't think have been manufactured in about 20 years.

[behringer]

That's why you should reach out to the presenter.