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by nullhole 224 days ago
The bit in the article about the recovery procedure, which involves dumping info from the tape into '100-ish GB of RAM' and then using software to analyze it stuck out to me.

This video on the linked github page for the analysis software[1] is interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YoolSAHR5w&t=4200s

[1] https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape

2 comments

Well, the tape may not survive its second pass across the read head, so it's good to capture the analog waveform in as much fidelity as possible.
I wonder if they'll find it suitable to bake [0] the tape first, which is quite popular in the audio restoration world but I'm not sure how much it applies to computer tape.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome

I don't know much about tapes but it seems to apply, since the post mentions it:

> I'm hoping I don't have to bake it, since that takes a day

What a fantastic talk! Thanks for sharing.