Comment by nullhole
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.