Comment by drittich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drittich | Hacker News Reader

I joined a group of vintage computing enthusiasts recently, dedicated to a specific platform. During a recent online meetup, I watched as one of the members attempted to archive newly discovered cassette tape copies of previously unavailable commercial software applications from the late '70s. These may well be the only copies in existence - at least as far as we know now they are.

During the meeting, there was a hairy moment where the tape broke and got tangled up and likely ruined. This happened because of an old splice, but fortunately was at the end of the tape just as everything got successfully archived (at least one copy of it anyway).

It was a cool moment to observe, and I now have copies of these applications in my possession.

> tape broke and got tangled up and likely ruined

I'm far from a beard-and-suspenders type who got to use those systems when they were current, but my understanding is that When a tape tangles it doesn't affect the magnetic data stored on the tape: only a sufficiently powerful magnet can do that - even if it got tangled-up inside the tape machine one would hope the machine was designed to not energize the erase or write heads unless the tape was known to be moving smoothly through the tape transport.

Yes, but if you DO lose a byte or two, it may render the whole thing unreadable, at least without getting into forensics.

When I worked in systems engineering, some of the folks a decade or two older had supported tape-based computing systems. Tape damage happened all the time. They would splice it back together, manually repair corrupt bits and bytes with something like a hex editor, etc. I don't know all of the details, but IIRC sometimes they'd use magnetic viewing film, which you can still buy.

It might not be documented well online, but if that really is the last copy in existence, it would be worth tracking down some mainframe-era sysadmins to ask for tape recovery advice, IMO.

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