Comment by reactordev 17 hours ago
Please let there be an ultimate force in the universe that spared this tape from tape degradation and/or magnetization that it can be read and extracted into a raw dump fs that we can preserve for all time. (fingers crossed)
Tapes from back then haven’t held up over the years. It all depends on the environment it was stored in.
I remember reading we're nearing a timeframe where VHS and cassette tapes made in the <=1980s will start degrading pretty seriously. So if you own lots of VHS or camcorder tapes you have a relatively short window to save old family videos... or just deal with fuzzy images and bad audio.
I recently went through this. The problem is finding VCR's... there arent any.
And then the ones with manual tracking are even more rare, or out of the price range, which you likely need as the tracks degrade.
There is one parity bit per 8 data bits, which is decently resilient - plus the recovery is pretty simple on the occasional bit flip. Combine that with the fact you can reference other sources to make up for missing/corrupted files - I think the chance that this is recoverable is pretty high provided the machine reading it is high quality. Checksumming on the source was unfortunately not commonplace until Unix 7, so it's unlikely there was any software-level integrity checks here. The tape looks like it was stored in a sealed container which is a very good sign. Those older tapes are actually more resilient than the later generation of tapes, and don't usually degrade the same way even with exposure to humidity.