Re: [TUHS] reading 9 track tapes?

At 12:46 AM 5/12/2015, Noufal Ibrahim KV wrote: Yes, I'm sure they do - as does the Computer History Museum, or many of the other computer museums, and a fair number of mailing-list houses, as well as many collectors, all still have functioning 9-tracks. There's a few on eBay at any given moment. A few years ago I travelled to Bettendorf, Iowa, to drop off two failed 9-track drives I had. A fellow there (http://www.comco-inc.com/) has one of the few - perhaps only? - remaining 9-track service and repair businesses. At that time he was hoping to down-size and retire, and was dreaming of finding someone to take over the business. It sounded like he had a bunch of 88780-class 9-tracks that would go to the scrapper. At the time, he offered to sell me a working 88780-style drive for about $1800. He said most people just want to read old tape data, not write it, so he wished for a new method to be able to read 7- and 9-track tapes just to recover data. One can imagine a flexible read head, a digitizer, and the rest is software. Indeed, that's what a few people have made as an experiment. There's still some equipment and processes that require a real drive and that do not work with tape emulators. He said there's a company out there that makes a modern 7-track drive for the seismic end of the oil industry at $50K a pop. He repaired and sold many 9914-style drives because they handled a longer block length needed by some oil industry applications. Another remaining market was a few specific models of 9-track that work with old Alcatel phone switches. - John