Re: Is ProDOS supported in OSX?

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Matthew Russotto replied:

>In article <20030624201105.08980.00000926@mb-m19.aol.com>,
>Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
>>Paul Schlyter wrote:
>>
>>Yes, this is clearly a case of waiting too long.
>>
>>The appropriate course of action in such a situation is to construct
>>one or more special tape transports designed to handle the tape
>>much more delicately than the original equipment did.  Slow-speed
>>transport that maintains most of the curvature of the tape on the
>>reel and non-contact sensing come immediately to mind.
>
>You probably don't have to go that far.  The 9-track transports I'm
>familiar with are quite rough -- they take up slack fairly quickly and
>with a big bump at the end.  Stopping that behavior (which can be done
>by manually taking up the slack, if the mechanism is open as many are)
>is probably enough to keep the tape from breaking.

This is probably true for most cases, but many tapes have been
stored for so long that there is real danger of the coating coming
off if their radius of curvature is changed too much.

I described an example of the precautions one would reasonably
take if one were to seriously undertake preservation of "archival"
data stored on "non-archival" media.  Success is not guaranteed,
but the probability of success can be maximized without too much
trouble.  The cost of constructing such readers could be amortized
over thousands of reels of "priceless" data.

This would be a worthwhile business proposition, I think, since
anyone who began seriously to undertake such projects would
have a very big advantage in experience and capital equipment
over potential competitors.  And there is apparently a large stock
of "priceless" data to be transferred--for a price.  ;-)

BTW, even with specialized mag tape reading equipment, it
would be _very_ much faster to recover a given amount of data
from mag tapes than from the equivalent boxes of punched
cards.  I would expect that any tape could easily be read
at tens of kilobytes per second or more without significant
stress to the media.

-michael

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