Comment by nullhole
1 month 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:
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.