[TUHS] reading historic magnetic tapes

[James Frew]

My "favorite" magtape story:

In a former life I managed a university research lab whose main activity 
was analyzing digital imagery from Earth satellites, back when said 
imagery was distributed and locally archived on 9-track magtape. Most of 
the OGs on this list will recall that the standard way of storing said 
magtapes was on floor-to-ceiling racks that held the tapes by a hook on 
the plastic ring (the "seal")  around the edge of the tape.

The story begins with a bunch of read errors showing up on some of the 
tapes. We quickly pinned it down to a specific sensor and range of 
dates, which of course led to a back-and-forth with NASA that didn't 
converge (other researchers were having no problems with identical data 
on tapes from the same batch, etc.)

As I was leaving the lab late one evening during this mini-crisis, I had 
to walk around a custodian who was busy giving the linoleum floor in the 
hallway its annual deep cleaning / polishing. This involved a dingus 
with a large (~18" diameter) horizontal buffing wheel, atop which sat an 
enormous (like, a cylinder about as big around as a soccer ball) 
electric motor, sparking commutator clearly visible through the vents in 
the metal housing. I asked the custodian if he'd done the floors in our 
lab recently. "Sure, they did them last week" (on the graveyard shift, 
apparently, since nobody noticed.) Hmm. Back into the lab, and there 
were the offending tapes, all occupying the bottom row of the tape rack, 
right next to an extra-shiny linoleum floor. Indeed, the floor 
*underneath* the tapes was mostly polished---the helpful custodian 
apparently ran the motor right up against the hanging tapes, to get the 
buffer as far under as possible...

Filed under "threats you never ever considered."

/Frew