[COFF] Re: reading historic magnetic tapes

["Charles H Sauer (he/him)" <sauer@technologists.com>]

This seems COFF, not TUHS, and mostly not digital...

I have many 4mm DAT cartridges from 20-30 years ago. Every now and then 
I will access one. So far I've yet to see evidence of the media degrading.

On 1/28/2023 4:12 AM, Steve Simon wrote:
> baking old, badly stored magnetic tapes prior to reading them is a common practice.

For the last year+ I have been digitizing selected audio tapes made in 
the 70s at AWHQ 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_World_Headquarters). The ones 
I've been working with are 1/4" on 10.5" reels. A printed inventory I 
was given says "bake" next to almost all of the items, but so far, after 
processing roughly 40 reels, I've yet to find one that seemed to need 
"baking" (actually, "baking" is a bit overstated, in that best practice 
is to raise temperature to roughly 150F -- 
https://www.radioworld.com/industry/baking-magnetic-recording-tape).

For now, I'm not able to share those AWHQ recordings, but I can share 
other recordings I made in the 60s and 70s at 
https://technologists.com/60sN70s/. In all those reels, many of which 
are cheap, unbranded tape, I didn't find any that seemed to me to need 
baking.

Charlie
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