Reading ancient QIC-150 tapes from a great Craigslist find!

[@Roscoe-gp4mj]

Thanks for the video. I have some background for you. I worked on these tapes for a certain company in Minnesota as an intern in 1994? 95? Something like that. I didn't design anything, just tested them in a lab. But I did get an understanding about some of the reasons things were done. I can give you some insight into the design choices to use a belt. It's all about: constant linear tape velocity at high speeds, and cheap tape transport mechanisms. It's pretty cool. Because the belt rides on the outside surface of the reels, the linear speed of the tape remains the same across the head, no matter where on the tape you are reading. And since the tape is being let out at the same linear speed as it is being picked up, the tape is not under much tension, even when moving at high speed. This is a really simple way to do this inexpensively. One comment on the belt damaging the oxide. The belt does not rub on the oxide, it makes contact with it, but because it is moving at the same speed as the tape, there is no rubbing between the belt and tape. Plus, this design made the QIC tape mechanism in the drives stupid simple. Compare your QIC tape drive to its contemporary mechanisms of a VCR or compact cassette. In a VCR the tape has to be pulled out of the cassette and read with a complicated rotating head to get a lot of data out of a slow moving tape. In a compact cassette the tape has to drop over multiple pins, and the tape has to be pinched between a capstan and roller which can only move the tape at a slow speed when reading. The QIC tape mechanism has a much simpler way to engage the tape, allowing cheap and simple drives. (Pulling tape at a constant speed by the hub is really hard, because the hub angular velocity has to change as the hub diameter changes. In fact in a compact cassette, the tape is not pulled by the hub when reading, rather it is pinched between a drive wheel and capstan. The pick up hub is driven with a slipping mechanism to keep that side of the cartridge under tension so the tape winds up.) You describe the choice of an elastic belt as a design flaw, I would call it a design compromise. In fact, the cartridge design is very tolerant to the tension on the belt. If it were not, you would not be able to swap in a rubber band and get it to work. I pulled the patent for the belt (US3692255A) and according to a quick read, the belt must have a coefficient of elasticity in the range from 0.01 to 0.25 m/Nm. and a pretension of at least 1.6 N. And the patent implies the target pretension is 4.4 N. That is a huge range. So, yes the belt relaxes. But, it can relax a lot and still be good. And, knowing the rigor I was being held to as an intern, I would assume the predicted relaxation of the belt was taken into account for any conservative estimate of product lifetime, which was probably not 30 years. Thanks for the video, it was fun to think about all this stuff again. (From 30 years ago, yikes.)

[@tiagodeaviz]

WOW. Just an awesome feedback on tape reading mechanics, and I agree. DAT and LTO tapes would endure much less if left sitting 30 years. QIC is a behemoth.

[@cmonkey63]

Oh man, this takes me back. I worked for a remote sensing company back in the 1980s and the satellite imagery came on 10 inch wide tape reels. Loading them was fun. They also had a 10-stack disk drum storage unit. Probably the same storage as a cheap thumb drive today. How things have changed.

[@josephlunderville3195]

If you're just doing some data archaeology the rubber band is probably fine, but keep in mind that rubber bands for office use degrade super fast -- my experience is months to single digit years once exposed to air and a little tension. The plastibands you reference are supposed to be longer lasting, so maybe they're better -- but people should be aware this is a risk and the exact material matters! I don't know if you can get silicone bands in the right size but that would probably be ideal

[@capralmarines4043]

What was the data on those tapes? It would be cool if you made another video showing us the data.

[@eternalifeproductions]

I was waiting for it. We got it! What did we get?

[@szr8]

I wonder if modern day Linux has the ability to just mount the tape, or loop mount the resulting image (giving the specific type and perhaps options to the mount command) or maybe even the tar program (which was originally for creating and reading *t*ape *ar*chives) and read the actual data (assuming this was used for backups.)

[@user-xv9fe4eo1b]

​​@@szr8it is tape-dependent. Not sure about QIC tapes and their kind, or about DDS, but LTO up to LTO-4 inclusive don't support no FAT and cannot be mounted as storage devices.

[@flagger2020]

On Sun systems we used BAR for multi tape archives which got around some limits and index being at the end of the tar file. Backing up home directories was one of my weekly tasks. Somehow I felt the older hw was just more robust. Although my PCs Colorado? qic120 drive was just unreliable..

[@mattzukowski1207]

If you dump a tape I'm virtually certain if it was created using tar it can be accessed with tar. The problem is in the 1990s drives were included with a controller and software package with little to no documentation thus it's a pain to identify to pull specific files. My memory is fuzzy on mounting a tape as a storage device. It was a pain when you made room on the tape by deleting files and the new data was fragmented and AFAIK the only way to defrag a tape is to dump it from and to a blank tape.

[@pavlovsky0]

I also use LTO tapes for my home backup. It's cost effective, especially when you buy as surplus as you are doing.

[@user-xv9fe4eo1b]

So I do. Got old tape library which supports drives up to LTO-4 grade, and LTO-3 tapes cost as much as 1-2 dollars each storing 400GB of uncompressed data.

[@Adam_Lyskawa]

I used to use those old tapes back in the days. But I've just checked LTO-9, damn, the prices are INSANE! Then I checked 16TB HDD prices and well, they are like 20 times cheaper. Of course, having expensive drive with less expensive tapes makes perfect economic sense... if you have like petabytes of data to store. How to collect that amount of data on home PC is beyond my comprehension or imagination. The tape drives are categorized in most stores as "server equipment" and I think it's where they belong.

[@user-xv9fe4eo1b]

@@Adam_Lyskawa modern LTO's are expensive af, but that's nothing strange for all that server stuff. For home use I'd say LTO-5 is the max grade that makes any sense

[@Stoney3K]

@@Adam_LyskawaDon't forget that tapes were intended to be shelf stable backup media. Hard drives with rotating precision components and bearings were not. Today I more or less expect them to be superseded by SSDs if their capacity is large enough.

[@poofygoof]

don't forget that tapes can have multiple files on them. "mt status" and "mt fsf 1" may be helpful here. If fsf 1 runs successfully, there's another file on the tape. some formats are picky about block sizes, and it may only be a problem on writes, but you may need to use "bs=XXX" to your dd command.

[@mikefochtman7164]

That's if you know the original OS was linux/ un*x. We had an off-the-wall OS called MPX by SEL. Used 768 bytes per record vs 512. That was a pain to deal with. Had to 'low level' format all the drives and such before we could use them.

[@Stoney3K]

Looks like he didn't use mt but instead just invoked dd to dump all of the binary data on the tape, including the blank sections. I don't believe dd really cares about an EOF marker in the data itself, it will only stop if the drive signals that there's no more data. Unless there is some hardware feature in the drive that is responsible for tape partitioning.

[@poofygoof]

​@@Stoney3K my experience (with QIC, 8mm, and DLT) is that dd will stop reading when the tape drive gets an EOF, but there may still be more data on tape that you have to use "mt fsf 1" to get to. I'm concerned that the tape data conservation job presented here is incomplete and there is unread data still on the tapes. tapes are not like disks, and the driver (at least under unix) doesn't know the length of a tape in advance, so software can't know it's read the entire tape until it hits the end-of-media (EOM) marker. two EOFs in a row was also common to indicate the last file on a tape. (if the tape was reused, it was possible to "mt fsf" after the double EOF to an older file on the tape...) A common use case was using a single tape to back-up multiple partitions with dump. as long as the "non-rewinding" tape device was used (/dev/nrstX on BSD) you could keep writing new dumps on tape until the tape ran out. when you wanted to restore, you would "mt fsf" to the appropriate file on tape and run restore. doing a dd from the beginning of the tape would get you the first dump, and stop. you'd have to "mt fsf 1" to restore contents from the next file. mt doesn't transfer any data, it just moves between files on a tape, sets density and block size, rewind, eject, retension, compression, stuff like that.

[@Stoney3K]

@@poofygoofYou're working on the assumption that these particular tapes are formatted in a way that Unix can actually handle the structure that is on the tape. If it was backed up under some Unix, then it could be true, but if it was done on a completely different system, there could be a completely different data format on the tape. The only thing you can be sure of are the hardware end stops on either end of the tape, as long as they are signaled to the system by the drive, as something like EOF EOF can mean a completely different thing when a non-Unix system was used to make the backup. I am a little concerned as well since dd appears to have finished but the tape is stopped halfway. Even a subsequent invoke of another dd may just grab the remaining data.

[@---li4yn]

​@@Stoney3Kdd would just have read data from the first tape file, and stopped at the first filemark. Any other files after that would have been missed.

[@medium-old]

Highly informative video on QIC tapes! Thank you for sharing, immensely helpful for rookie tape enthusiasts

[@DangerousPictures]

When dumping the tape you can append status=progress to your dd command and dd will show you how much data was written and speed

[@user2C47]

You can also use progress -m from another tty. (If you run dd as root, make sure to also run progress as root)

[@DmitryBrant]

Nice, thanks! I'll admit I'm an embarrassing novice with the Linux command line.

[@DangerousPictures]

@@user2C47 you can also do kill -usr1 without root

[@GameInterest]

We need the big reveal! What was on the tape?

[@ForgottenMachines]

This is great! One of the few videos beyond mine showing how to restore QIC Cartridges, nicely done! I've added your video to my published pages showing how to replace tension bands at 10:20 ...yours is the FIRST video showing this since the series that I did several years ago...nice!

[@DmitryBrant]

Thanks for visiting! I believe we might have corresponded briefly earlier this year regarding recovering QIC-525 tapes for a client. Hope you're well!

[@ForgottenMachines]

@@DmitryBrant Yes, we did! Thank you, back in July 2022, I see our email history. I thought I recognized your name. Excellent! So, this is the setup that you used, similar to mine. Are you using the Tandberg TDC-3620 , or a slightly different Tandberg model?

[@My_Op]

Yeah! I love your voice and presentation: I knew nothing about those cartridge but now I want you to teach me about more stuff 🙂

[@mick_hyde]

We used these as backup tapes at work just over 10 years ago 😮

[@paulstubbs7678]

I used to like the QIC tapes, quite ruggard, never had a drive belt failure. However the rubber drive wheel on my tape drive turned to mush and glued itself to the last tape I put in. As mine was only 60MB, by the time it failed, hard drives were getting to the size that made this thing somewhat useless, so I just put it all aside. So you can read them with Linux!, pity you didn't go into how you did that, the only way I ever used them was via the DOS software, 'SYTOS' that came with the drives & controller. I have some LTO tapes and a drive out of an old IBM 'system X3500' server, but I have no software etc to get them going in either Windows or Linux - so it would be nice to see a video on them, but please add a bit more than 'I used Linux to read them'

[@brianjrichman]

I used to use those 150 tapes to carry patches with me when I was a support guy for a computer manufacturer. Had quite the collection in the trunk of my car. It was either that or 8" floppy disks!!!!!!!

[@fillg]

Before I finally escaped the IT business around 2010 we had a 24 tape auto-changer full of those LTO tapes for our backups. We did a full backup each weekend and differential backups each night. In order to claim we had "offsite backups" of all our data they had me take the current full backup plus each nights differential backup home with me. That was fine until someone broke into my garage one night and stole my favorite sunglasses, about $3 in change, and the bag with our backup tapes out of my car. They made some changes after that little security breach.

[@ForgottenMachines]

12:25 Looks like you're using a Tandberg TDC-3620 setup with SCSI adapter on modern Linux. I started with the EXACT same setup back in 2015 when I wanted to archive the first copy of CTIX...a lost Convergent Technologies brand of UNIX for the MightyFrame! Nice!

[@maximalhunter4519]

what was the data......

[@DmitryBrant]

Still going through the contents of the tapes, but nothing too significant so far... The most interesting thing on one of the tapes was a rare version of Unix (System V) for Motorola 68000 processors.

[@aytviewer2421]

Same question here!

[@FlatBroke612]

Big bush Pr0n

[@59withqsb12]

@@DmitryBrant I'd be really interested to see a video about some of the things you find. If the UNIX sys V is recoverable, that could be a brilliant collab with someone who has a computer than can run it.

[@blinkinglightsandsmokingcaps]

​@@59withqsb12 Finding surviving .(never mind working!) hardware of that era can be tricky. I'm trying to track down variants of one such system, but it seems most models made were later trading in to the manufacturer for Intel based hardware instead, or had their motherboard swapped for a similar Intel model.

[@mikehibbett3301]

Awesome recovery! Thankyou for sharing. Recovering data from old media IMHO is so important, as we are no longer looking at ancient print or cuniform tablets.

[@quantumleap359]

We used the 1/4 inch backup cassettes in the 90s. Really, other than having to have a months worth of tapes 35 or so, and a little maintenance of the drive, the system was flawless. Only had to use the backup tapes 3 times, but each time it was a lifesaver. Basically backed up each day's worth of business data. Thanks for the video!

[@DigitalDiabloUK]

Worth noting the 'watch' command for when you want to monitor something like a growing file via ls, without having to keep manually using the same command.

[@Arc.hitectureMusic]

Subscribed to your channel after this video. Loved your presentation style, kept me interested throughout the video.

[@erniesdeck7550]

Great video I had no idea these storage types even existed. Thanks for sharing

[@KeesAlderliesten]

those rubber bands will fail over time, true, but that time is longer that it's usable life time. People stopped using these tapes long before the bands broke. We sold hundreds of these tapes, never encountered a broken band. Desing flaw? probably, but a good calculated flaw.

[@RonLauzon]

Tape backup processes were usually circular. You backed up. That tape went off site. An off site tape came back that you used for the next backup. Most of the time, the tape itself would be wore out (or you would assume it wore out) and the tape would be replaced. 99% of the time, the tapes were never actually read. Just every so often to test the backup process. I don't think these tapes were meant to have data put on them, then sit in a box for 30 years.

[@mikefochtman7164]

We had a legal requirement for some of our records that a few be sent to 'records vault'. But once a year they would send us a batch from 5 years before that we had to re-read and then 'write' again. Something about 'refreshing' them and proving they were, in fact, 'readable'.

[@KevinInPhoenix]

I used QIC tapes in the 90s. They use simple parity to detect read errors but are unable to correct errors. A single error would abort a restore operation. The 4mm and 8mm tapes of the same era used ECC to detect and correct read errors and so were much more reliable.

[@janpedersen9120]

This was totally awesome to watch, we even saw how the data was read out ;) i can say i didnt really know that these bands where that bad, thanks for doing this informative video with all . i learned something ..

[@JacGoudsmit]

Another flaw is that the pinch rollers in the drives wear out in the same way as the rubber bands in the cartridges. Fortunately your drive appears to be in great shape.

[@poofygoof]

I have some QIC-24 drives where the pinch roller has crumbled and fallen apart. I had a QIC-525 drive that I used for backups through the mid 2000s that looked similar to your tandberg, (it was probably OEM'd for DEC,) that would probably still be working if it hadn't been dropped on a concrete floor. ;) I miss the sound of the QIC drives. You could tell you were streaming instead of shoe-shining if the motor speed was constant. DLTs seemed like they were built into larger cases or mechanisms (like changers) so it was harder to listen for.

[@DmitryBrant]

Yep, it seems to depend greatly on the manufacturer of the drive. Archive Viper drives seem to be the most affected by this issue (the roller turns to goo), while Tandberg drives have held up very well.

[@techhoppy]

Would enjoy seeing a video on how you examine, restore directories/files from the newly restored data. Or, to even examine the out.bin file. :)

[@FuzzyKaos]

This is so so cool!

[@scsirob]

Great episode, thanks! The design could have been so much better by using a rigid, enduring material for the belt and a spring-loaded tension roller in the belt path. There's plenty of space to add that to the cartridge. Even adding a pivot and spring to one of the corner rollers would have worked.

[@thorsteinj]

If these tapes were designed to have a 30 year shelf life (as some are), then I would just unhook it he band from either of those small wheels before storage. No way the band will still be in spec after 30 years. I know because I’ve done the dumb thing on an SLR7 tape - which has the same exact design/form factor. The belt got tangled under the reels and caused havoc with the tape but still managed to manually spool it back on and re-tension it with another belt… and miraculously save most of it (excerpt the ripped part which was spliced as you would splice audio tape back in the days). Amazing stuff!

[@tyr3759]

I've called 1990 and gave them your suggestions

[@badscrew4023]

There's a plus side of this design: there is no belt inside the drive so no belt to make the drive itself unusable.

[@tiagodeaviz]

These tapes were THE preferred way to backup AS/400 Systems :)

[@robwebnoid5763]

I have a couple or so of these larger QIC tapes. And I still have our smaller QIC (QIC-40?) tapes that we bought in the early 1990's to back up our office computer, however I have not reread them since the 1990's. I have about 3 QIC tape drives, one external. Perhaps I will have to check them again of these days before my earthly time is up, heh.

[@idahofur]

When I started into computers. It was when the 120 qic drives was all the rage. Then you had 250, 350, TR-1 - 4 as you explained. When I got back into computers. It was LTO-4 drives. I can't tell you how many people hated tape drives. When I started at my current job years ago. They couldn't stand them. What I found out was that nobody would show the customer how to do simple maintenance and check. They would just keep throwing the tape in each day. I can't tell you how many companies I ran across that after they was sold a server with a backup solution. The place they purchased it from just walked away. But, that is another story.

[@Brice23]

Watching someone who knows what they are doing as they work on technology that I know nothing about is always a fairly interesting departure from the usual.

[@computer_toucher]

Once I got two Compaq DLT-30 drives from an old Proliant rack (including the 2x Pentium Pro server, the disk cabinet AND the 60 kg UPS). Heavy beasts. A Linux nerd gave me his old backup tapes for it, and I actually used it for backup of my 20 GB secondary hard drive :) I just used tar.

[@minombredepila1580]

Thanks for showing us how to repair que QICs. Appreciate it!

[@haroldfarthington7492]

how does this channel not have more subs???

[@dataterminal]

Here in the UK a lot of our 80s micro computers used regular audio cassette tapes to store programs/games on, even sold like that as retail. I've had a lot of experience with those types of tapes and I can see why they've gone with a pully system inside the QIC tapes instead of a drive cog arrangement. The pully system here would have ensured that both wheels would have turned at the same time even when the size of the tape spools got larger or smaller, since it's the act of dragging the actual tape around moves the wheels. This means they don't have to worry about calulating RPM and, most importantly, the tape isn't stretched over time as it winds back and forth. As you've shown for maintenance, replacing the pully elastic is easy enough to do and while the pully probably didn't degrade while these were in everyday use for the several years they were probably used before upgrading to larger tapes or alternative backups they have, and I'm sure while they were in use that the pully did snap on the odd occasion. It probably wouldn't have desynced or damaged the actual tape, and maybe they did, maybe they didn't sell replacement parts for the pully elastic at the time. Then the mechanical side of the drive; would have loved to see the inside of that as well. I'm assuming it's just got one cog for the back and forward attaching to the tape cassette itself as that's all it needs, very simple and reliable. Is that a direct driven motor, or does it also have a pully that need to be maintained?

[@thorsteinj]

The motor is on a pivot of some sorts and “folds in” towards the tape when the tape is inserted. It’s just a “rubbery” wheel that uses friction to turn the smaller plastic wheel on the tape itself. Belts and friction is better than cogs for safety I guess if the tape sticks the wheel will spin but with a cog it would snap the tape or potentially burn the motor - obviously possible to design around but more complex. And cogs are prone to failure; looking at all you small plastic cogs from various drives that have broken over the years.

[@AndyHullMcPenguin]

Another major flaw the QIC-XXX tape system suffers from is the optical sensor used to detect the lead in part of the tape. If this fails (invariably due to dust and grime) then the drive winds all of the tape on to one spool, and from there on, the tape is unreadable, in any drive. The solution was to clean the optical sensor, then manually re-spool the leader portion of the tape back on to the capstan from which it has become detached. Not a difficult operation, but fiddly, and somewhat slow. The number of tapes that customers reported as having "snapped" in this way was huge. "Data recovery" from the "snapped" tape was to simply do what I have described.

[@mikebarushok5361]

Yep, made a fair bit of money respooling tapes and cleaning the optical sensors back in the day.

[@mattzukowski1207]

I bought higher density tape and spooled onto older cartridges, and added tape holes to ID a higher capacity tape. Good times. I spent a fair amount of time converting from QIC to CD because it was assumed the tapes had a more limited lifespan. Also QIC was far more expensive than other formats per tape and optical media was cheaper for long term archive.

[@wesley00042]

I have backups of my old BBS (from 1992-1994ish) and other data on QIC-40 tapes. Even though the drive and software still work perfectly, the belt stuck/broke on 8 of the 11 tapes (after almost 30 years of non-climate-controlled storage.) It's on my to-do list to clean off the belt goo and replace the belts on them.

[@Knaeckebrotsaege]

Another problem I've faced with QIC tapes: the drive itself. As you mentioned the cartridge itself has a hard plastic wheel. So the engaging end in the drive needs to have a rubber wheel to drive it. I don't think I need to go any further for you to guess where the problem lies...

[@DmitryBrant]

Absolutely right! Some drive manufacturers are much better than others in this respect. From what I've seen, Archive Viper drives are the worst - pretty much all of them have a rubber wheel that has turned to goo. But on the other hand, my Tandberg 3600 drives are still as solid as ever.

[@Knaeckebrotsaege]

@@DmitryBrant That, plus even if the wheel hasn't turned into goo, if someone left a tape in it at some point for whatever reason, it'll have a flat spot just like a regular audio cassette or VCR pinch roller would have and be just as unusable. Ask me how I know 😐

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

RD RAM Modules are for IBM PS2 Motherboards and are installed in pairs and the terminator modules are required to fill the unused RD RAM slots.

[@MrCrrispy]

They were super reliable, I did my PC backups on this back in the time with a used drive I got from a customer and an Adaptec scsi card 🙂

[@woodwaker1]

Would be interesting to see what the data contents are. I started with 7 track 556 tapes back in the early 1970's we converted data from 1/2 inch tapes to microfilm, using a mini pc (DEC PDP8) and a lot of specialized boards and hardware. One reason was the long term readability of microfilm vs magnetic media.

[@ivok9846]

why? magnetics can last a lifetime...

[@woodwaker1]

@@ivok9846 They may, but having the equipment to read them is a much more difficult process

[@ivok9846]

@@woodwaker1 versus specialized boards and hardware that puts 1s and 0s on microfilm?

[@thorsteinj]

Isn’t the microfilm etching done as 2d Barcodes on the film? All you need is a projector and software to read the codes and if that is documented you could almost do it by hand. There was a company in Norway who etched data onto 35mm film this way, using surplus subtitling equipment. From experience, even 30 year old film is very durable, and easily readable with just a light source and lenses if you really need to do it. Magnetic? No chance. You need way more equipment just to get started. And the tape is much thinner and possibly less durable.

[@Funkylogic]

Used to service these back in the 80s. Wangtek, Everex and Mountain I think they were all SCSI 2 from memory.

[@mattzukowski1207]

Not exactly. I'm not saying these guys didn't make any SCSI-2, the 525meg Wangtek 5525 was straight SCSI, but typically if they had an edge card connector they were either QIC-02 or QIC-36. However often a controller was mounted directly to the drive and by way of this controller you had SCSI. If there was an edge pin connection on the bottom with a pig tail to an edge card odds are this was a QIC-02/QIC-36 drive with a SCSI controller. I'm not sure Everex made the tape drives. They 100% had packages which included a controller card, big chassis/power supply and often a Wangtek drive, and a big honking DB50ish cable, and an ISA card. If we're talking roughly 15-250meg tapes odds are high we we are talking QIC-02 or QIC-36 and not SCSI. In the box I often found Wangtek drives.

[@Funkylogic]

@@mattzukowski1207 yeah i recall the QIC-02 now and the there was also a few ESDI units briefly but most stuff went over to SCSI mostly using the Adaptec 1640 i think it was.

[@denniseldridge2936]

Hi, I found this a fascinating dive into the tape cartridges I saw so much of in my own career. I didn't know that they started life so long ago, as I'd always assumed that they were a late 80's invention. My only disappointment with the video was not knowing if you found anything of interest on the tapes. That's actually what I came to the video to see. I'm not talking about personal data or private corporate information, just a general overview of what sort of information might have been stored on them. But otherwise, this was a great video. I'd really be interested to know what's on the 9-track tapes as well lol.

[@myinterests5573]

The first picture you showed for a tape drive was a Tallgrass Technologies unit - an early one. That cabinet could hold both a tape drive and a hard drive, I believe that product line was called a "hard file" or some such. Tallgrass was producing external HDD cabinets for IBM PC's (the original PC, the XT came out later) before IBM was making hard drives available for them. I worked for TGT's help desk for several years. One correction - you said the tape had 18 tracks. In actuality, the number of tracks on a QIC tape was determined by the drive that wrote to it. Later drives could put that many tracks on it, earlier drives, like the Tallgrass system you pictured, could only do ... either 4 or a 8, don't recall. I believe there were 4 generations of the larger QIC tape units. Also - Tallgrass early tape systems were completely proprietary. it had it's own card that went in an expansion slot, and the early tape format was was essentially DOS for a tape drive, unimaginatively called "TOS" or Tape Operating System. You install the hardware, then run an operating system driver that tuned the tape drive into a disk drive, you could copy files to and from, it supported directories - you could even install programs to it. It had its own redundancy, I believe it was called interleaved. Each data segment included 2 blocks for data and a 3rd for CRC, so if a data block was corrupted the drive could recover the missing data from the CRC block. Later tallgrass systems had a CPU on it's own interface card.

[@dashorken]

I had a Tallgrass drive that used DC6250 tapes and standard SCSI. It supported an indexing system for faster file restores... all in DOS program. Was nice for it's day!

[@dashorken]

For those more curious on the Tallgrass version of the Tandberg drive, they had a custom eprom on the drive so you could use any old Tandberg drive. I still have the Tallgrass File Secure DOS diskettes. I just need to find a drive!

[@clabretro]

Nice haul!

[@mikefochtman7164]

When we ported from one platform to another we stopped using these. Then, seven years later, the 'records department' sent all the backups back to us for 'destruction'. For some legal reasons, we had to destroy all those records and that's when that darned solid aluminum frame became an issue. We finally resolved that we could send them all to a shredding company, so we ended up literally 'shredding' about 70 of those QIC cartridges. (as you've demonstrated, just because the owner throws them out, the data is not destoryed, so be careful with sensitive data)

[@FalconFour]

Wish you'd've gone into more detail (and diligence) about the data itself -- at the end of the video, I was shouting "you didn't read anything!". You just DD'd the raw data out of the drive, potential errors and all. Don't know what format it is, what software wrote the tapes, or anything about getting to the actual data. With just a raw dd, you've got no way to feed it back into the original software, or even to write it back out to a new tape and include any format-specific metadata (track positioning, markers, etc?) that the tape may have contained. May as well have just played it into an audio recorder and said "ha! we got the tape!". Really wanted to see more about the software and try to figure out what was actually on the tape. By now many of us probably know that the belts are broken ;)

[@thorsteinj]

It is my understanding that the drive itself will report read errors just like any other device. Trying to dd a broken CD; it will stop at errors. There is also a point about software but while most backup/tape software used various schemes they all wrote data the same way, afaik. Meaning you could use modern tools to convert it to a tar from bkf for instance. There is a page out there going into details about this - but your point is valid, the best way of doing this would be to preserve the flux data from the tape and emulate it all; hook, line and sinker.

[@CoolDudeClem]

I allways wondered how the reels on theese tapes turn without any way to directly turn them like a cassette recorder would.

[@chipdamage1002]

Really neat to see. Not sure I agree re the design though: you repeatedly call the tape design "inferior"; inferior compared to what? As you demonstrate, if after several decades the belt has decayed, you can just replace it (I imagine more official belts can be had on ebay). This is a fairly simple, inexpensive and straightforward repair, and you're up and running again. Compare this to a DVD: after decades, there's a good chance the dye layer has rotted, or been damaged because unlike the tape it has almost no protection from one side. So purely from a design perspective the tapes seem to be far better (though obviously this old style can't match the DVD for capacity). I've encountered something similar repairing old audio tape decks and CD players. 8 out of 10 "broken" tape decks just need $10 of new belts and they work like a charm, but if a CD player goes it's a giant pile of e-waste because it's usually a broken laser, and replacing it is far too expensive, difficult and time-consuming to bother with. In general, I've concluded tape mechanisms are far superior mechanically, despite having more moving parts, because 98% of those parts are far more durable, and those that aren't are easily user-serviced. I was born in the 80s, and I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few tape decks from then end up living longer than me. Second-hand CD players, meanwhile, are already rapidly diminishing in number.

[@marksykes8722]

The tall stacks of 3480 tape cartridges were a relief to carry and load compared to their 9 track tape reel predecessors.

[@JohnKiniston]

I used to write to tapes directly with tar waaaay back in the day.

[@edgeeffect]

It's funny only last night I was thinking about my big (are they 1-inch?) data tape I used to have at college, how cool it was, and how much I wish I still had it. And likewise (but not quite as much) for my old QIC cartridges. :)

[@waynesharp1690]

Love those tapes. Not familiar with them in the UK but I missed a lot of things in the past.

[@eliotmansfield]

They were used in the uk a lot in the early 90’s - tecmar used to rebrand them alot

[@davidcorner1174]

I remember using those as a Trainee Computer Operator lol.

[@chris1roll]

Types in a 'disk destroyer' command. "I _think_ that's right...." Hits enter. You havve my sense of humour.

[@JeffreySJonas]

SVR3.0 is probably Unix System V release 3.0 such tapes were often in TAR or CPIO format, still supported by Linux

[@PlaywithJunk]

Those cheap rubber bands will probably last only a year or two. But for reading the tape they work.

[@cliffmathew]

I looked for a tape backup solution for nostalgic reasons, but gave up as I did not want to use the older interfaces, and all modern interfaces were exorbitantly expensive. At work, I had used 3M DC-600A in the early 90s, and eventually DLT, LTO etc. until around 2006.

[@turnkit]

Good but I wish you’d at least briefly mention the tools. Some questions I was a bit frustrated weren’t answered: year, cpu, make and model of system motherboard; make and model of scsi card you used - and why; linux distribution and why that one?; command line tool used to dump contents. And perhaps for another video, consider a deep dive on opening up the tape image and doing ant forensics on the data.

[@RicardoBanffy]

`watch ls -alh` would prevent the need to repeat the command at the other terminal. The h is to use human-friendly units

[@trs80model14]

I have a 3590e tape cart that was created on an as400. 3480 drives are relatively cheap but a drive that can read 3590e is *not* cheap.

[@gomergomez1984]

Wow I forgot that wonderful tape noise, been years since last used.

[@patrickcardon1643]

I'm all for your lootbox idea ... sign me up!

[@janedagger]

I suggest sending the memory sticks to LGR ! :)

[@radiosnmore]

i miss that format i had a qic 80 drive that could read 1gb travan tapes....i sure do miss Ximat drives ..i rmember the sound and win 95 backup natively supported Colorado drives

[@jerryvr]

Just use a windows machine with Arcserve and do a tape inventory, 90% chance it was backupped with it, 10 % chance it was Palindrome/Backup Exec..

[@paulstaf]

So how do you convert the DD file into usable/readable data? I was disappointed you didn't show that.

[@mattzukowski1207]

Golly... I didn't know there was a 4 track version which would be 20meg for DC300A and 40meg for DC600A with the 300/600 being the measurement in feet. By the time I got into that format 150meg was a bit long in the tooth. If I also recall correctly the DC600A tapes could also handle 15 track for 125meg but you had to go 18 track for 150meg. And there was NOT a lot of downward compatibility. There was however a plethora of support in Windows NT for most of the Wangtek drives and many of the ISA controllers. The biggest pain from this era was proprietary QIC-02 and QIC-36 controllers. Not to speak of the plethora of SCSI controllers bolted to the drive itself. Good times!

[@jefforymitchell5697]

Ooof all that build up and we didn't even see any data?

[@uzimonkey]

I get the impression that the belts were so cheap because they didn't want you using them for archival purposes, they likely sold archival tapes that were basically the same thing but lasted longer.

[@1kreature]

Try putting a photodiode/phototransistor on the status led of the Tandberg and hook the signal up to a oscilloscope 😜 According to someone who worked on these drives during design some firmwares sent out status codes on the led :)

[@erickvond6825]

Something of noteworthiness here is that not all rubber bands are created equally. Some can degrade in a short time so you don't want the ones which are labeled as "biodegradable." They d=tend to break down over just a few short months and can stick to the tape pulling the oxide layer off and destroying the data.

[@kevincozens6837]

I'm not a fan of using tape for backups. I used to use 4mm DAT tapes back in the days when the Adaptec 2940 was supported via a custom patch from a .mil site. It worked for a time but both of the SCSI based tape drives failed. The two drives failed in different ways so that I made a third by combining the working parts of the two but that combo also died after a while. At that point I gave up on using tapes. I still have the tapes and would like to recover the data from the some day to see what is on them.

[@jacquesb5248]

got a few qic80 tapes and the tape drive but it uses a printer port and psu is broken. but i have used ancient pcbackup so that is a bust. also got a 2400dpi scsi scanner......so fun times

[@Davesvinyl]

this just come up on my home page. i love things like that. i wish you did a close up of the drive working as i enjoy watching thigs like that work look forward to videos on all the other things you got in that crate

[@59withqsb12]

Same here, this came up in my feed so I came straight over to watch. I'd love to see that close up and maybe a deep dive into the actual contents of the tape.

[@DmitryBrant]

Thanks! I'm planning to do a follow-up, since even more stuff has arrived.

[@Davesvinyl]

@@DmitryBrant great look foreword to seeing them

[@whitelion7976]

I have a few of those tapes and also their belt is perished.

[@PsRohrbaugh]

I have some old tapes from my dad's Unix system somewhere. Wonder if I can find them and get them read by you...

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

I wish that Philips had gone for a standard like the QIC-150 instead of of the DCC cassettes, and have a secondary drive for analogue cassettes.

[@kevorm]

there is a utility named pv that would let you see progress of what you're doing. If you were to use dd if=/some/dev/ | pv | dd of=dump.file you'd get speed and progress you might have to install the package first

[@user2C47]

In some cases this can slow the transfer down by a lot. Instead, just add status=progress to dd or use the progress command.

[@kevorm]

I was unaware of that. thank you.@@user2C47

[@pypes84]

I've seen rubber bands turn to goop in ~3 months, I'd consider storing these 'bandless' until you need them.

[@nickolasgaspar9660]

Great .......more rubber belts.....

[@CiscoWes]

I was hoping you would say what was on the tape!

[@davidhalliday7776]

Ah but that was only the first file. There could be more. I notice you did use the none rewinding device (nrst) I guess you just skipped this detail to keep the video short. Installed lots of Sun machines from from QIC-60 tape back in the day. From early M6800 based Sun-3, through the monster Sun-4 systems and early SPARCstations 's

[@DmitryBrant]

Very perceptive! Yes, I do generally proceed to read any additional files from the tape until it reaches EOT.

[@joeminpa6705]

I swear I've seen those somewhere other than in a business/home use.

[@davedonker7019]

I also have a couple of those tapes. Found them decades back in a dumpster. But have no reader. Would like to know whats on them

[@andersrimmer6675]

So, I saw you mentioned the contents of one of the tapes was a Motorola 68000-version of SysV - Just thought you should know the Amiga community has been searcing nearly 30 years for the source files to Amix (Amiga Unix), which were stored on 6150-tapes... But since you commented on the rarity of your find, I'm sure you know that you (might) have. But please don't keep all of us old farts in the dark. It's dark enough down here as it is ;)

[@HunterShows]

Well what was on the tape? Mystery data?

[@luigicirelli2583]

so, what's in it?

[@apl175]

Rhomat, Deltamat, Iotamat, Kappamat, etc.

[@50shadesofbeige88]

Oooh look at all that RAM

[@grantbanstead1971]

Not terrible - brilliant. The alternative of open 8" floppies, now that's terrible. My 30 year old tapes all still work.

[@janovlk]

I used them in 1992-3.

[@thehighwayman78]

How does this design work when the spools get to different diameters? I don't get it.

[@flinch622]

Soon, digital archeology will be a profession.

[@CandyGramForMongo_]

You’re talking to my inter Archivist. 😂

[@emdxemdx]

So, what was on the tape?