[TUHS] Re: reading historic magnetic tapes

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