Posted on 12/26/2020 6:25:28 AM PST by blam
The batteries were not affected by the magnets. When you buy Chinese batteries at the dollar store their shelf life is not very long. But you are lucky that they went dead before you could put them inside something that would have been damaged when they leaked.
I'm horrified! 
That was not my story! I forgot to properly tag the headline with a link to the original.
An EMP would take out the tape, not the CDs...
I wish I had known that storage of media would become such an important job. If I had known that 40 years, that would have been a good job for me.
“A couple more parameters whould be of interest:
1. What is the access time?
2. What is the read/write cycle time?
3. How much is overhead, particularly for error-correction?”
My questions exactly. Tapes are sequential access so getting into anything will take much longer than random access devices
...also what are the storage requirements in terms of temperature and humidity. Given these parameters what is the lifetime of the tape? How many trips through the heads before it wears out? How many read/write cycles before the magnetic media wears out?
“ What good is an 8-track music tape or a Beta video tape to someone without the equipment to read the data on the tapes?
What good are all the files people stored on old style 5” floppy discs without a device that can read the discs?”
Does this mean my Zip drive will be valuable some day?
When I first started working at our 911 center the hard drives were backed up onto tape. We had to change a bunch of them every night and go through a specific procedure which was a time consuming pain in the butt. It was a relief when the system was upgraded and backup and storage was moved off site, but I do wonder how much more reliable the new system really is.
I started out with cassette tape storage on home computers in the late 1970s. What a miracle when we were able to afford a floppy disc drive. “Home computers” typically used single sided 5 1/4” floppies to begin with. You could buy a notcher so that you could turn them over and use the other side. Some people believed that the dirt collected by the wipers built into the floppy would release the dirt they had collected and they would self destruct when turned over and they were running the opposite direction, but I never had any trouble.
I originally had dual 320 kB double sided dual 5.25” floppies on the first PC XT Clone that I put together. They were upgraded to dual 3.5” 720 kB double density floppies, and then later these were upgraded to 3.5” “1.44 MB” high density drives which became the standard for many years.
The first hard drive I purchased was for an XT clone that I put together. It was a 10 MB MFM unit that fit in two 5.25” bays and cost 100s of dollars. My first tape drive was a QIC 40 multi-track which could back up 60 MB. I had a program that controlled it and the hard drive and could essentially have the two of them simulate a much larger hard drive with what could sometimes seem like a lot of delay when it had to retrieve something from the tape.
A friend of mine had a controller that worked with a VHS Video tape recorder to store data on video tapes. Video recorders used a rotating head to store the data on the tape not in a straight line but as multiple diaginal lines running across the tape. It stored what seemed like massive amounts of data at the time for much less expense per MB than the QIC tapes but it was a very expensive setup by comparison with some other disadvantages in retreival times as well.
I hear they are working on that lol
Hum Drum Storage? Massive storage capacity. (Retrieval time is pretty sucky though...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luPM6XaKZuU
A friend of mine had a controller that worked with a VHS Video tape recorder to store data on video tapes. Video recorders used a rotating head to store the data on the tape not in a straight line but as multiple diaginal lines running across the tape. It stored what seemed like massive amounts of data at the time for much less expense per MB than the QIC tapes but it was a very expensive setup by comparison with some other disadvantages in retrieval times as well.
Alpha Microsystems made a VHS backup controller. If I recall, they could write the backup to the same VHS tape as a form of redundancy.
They can't exceed the internal bus speed of the computer.
Not to mention the time it must take to position itself to the data you are requesting. 8>)
I believe that was the system that he used... I found an article from an earlier time period with your prompting.
https://tidbits.com/1991/01/07/vcr-backups/
I actually have a stack of multitrack QIC tapes and an old computer still setup with hard drive caddies and a tape backup device in it. I haven't fired it up in years. I would have to replace the CMOS battery and try to remember which settings to use in BIOS to get everything to run correctly... hopefully the defaults would work... and then I could see if that device could still read any of the tapes.
It will be a flop unless the porn industry adopts it. Porn is the true driver of technology success.
I found another article that said that a VHS tape could store up to 6 GB back then. This was an almost unimaginable amount of data in a time when a 3.5” “floppy” was the standard for portable storage. I remember buying an 850 MB hard drive long ago at Sam's Club and wondering how I would ever use that much data.
Ah yes, the early days of networking. We used the term sneakernet to describe how it was faster to carry a floppy disk across the room or building than it was to send the same data over the internal network.
My brother had a reel to reel, it worked fine for recording and playback. I thought Cassette tapes were so so, 8tracks just sucked.
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