avar 4 hours ago

    > This is rare enough that I'm pushing the recovery
    > of it up near the top of my project queue.
The reader is left to wonder what the software librarian at the Computer History Museum could have possibly found recently that warrants a placement ahead of Unix v4 in their project queue. A copy of Atlantian Unix from the ancient Library of Alexandria?
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  • gregw2 3 hours ago

    Perhaps a prior promise to someone else?

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    • mbreese an hour ago

      Or you know... just the definition of a FIFO Queue. I mean, using a FILO Stack to organize your work would certainly be a choice...

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      • rtkwe an hour ago

        Definitionally if they're "pushing it near the top" they're not only using FIFO, there's a priority ordering involved...

        My guess is there's stuff in progress and maybe they need to arrange access to or setup the readers for a tape that old and of potentially unknown format.

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        • nish__ an hour ago

          Yes it's probably better to finish in progress stuff first.

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nullhole 15 hours 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

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  • kragen 13 hours ago

    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.

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    • hunter2_ 10 hours ago

      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

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      • debugnik 8 hours ago

        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

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  • sedatk 13 hours ago

    What a fantastic talk! Thanks for sharing.

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mongol 17 hours ago

Interesting article. I agree it is kind of a big deal. Certainly worth the effort to try to restore

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