Thanks to Steve Lewis for this write-up...and for allowing me the opportunity to analyze the tapes of the IBM 5100!
In the words of Steve Lewis:
As things settled down a bit Sunday afternoon, I got time to catch up with AJ of Forgotten Machines (here). I had come across some original IBM 5100 tapes (off eBay) that, as far as I’m aware, aren’t archived anywhere. Before attempting to load them on a physical drive, we hoped to find an expert to help improve our odds (such as by digitizing the content and attempting to read it on new media). And AJ was up for trying!
AJ has a kind of “Uncle Fester from Addams Family” persona, which I mean in a very positive way (very energetic). AJ was using his own custom homebrew equipment that we jokingly called “Doc Brown Style” (ironically, the actor Chrispher Lloyd played the character Uncle Fester in one of the Addams Family movies – and also played as Doc Brown in the Back to the Future series).
AJ showed how he is able to fully control upper and lower heads of his “universal QIC reader” device (that he designed and built), to seek out data within tracks. The DC300 tapes used in the IBM 5100-series, and Tektronix systems of around those same year, used a 2-track system as opposed to the more elaborate 9-track tape systems. But finding the exact track positions requires a specialized device, which is exactly what AJ has built. Getting insight into this process was great – and we think that we did find and record a session of data. But VCF Staff was getting exhausted and security had to close up the building – we’ll resume this work over the coming months!
