I've added https://oldbytes.space/@bitsavers/115505135441862982 and https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/07/unix_fourth_edition_t... to the toptext as well. Thanks!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857695 has discussion

Interesting article. I agree it is kind of a big deal. Certainly worth the effort to try to restore

The bit in the article about the recovery procedure, which involves dumping info from the tape into '100-ish GB of RAM' and then using software to analyze it stuck out to me.

This video on the linked github page for the analysis software[1] is interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YoolSAHR5w&t=4200s

[1] https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape

You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in.

Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus.

The gold standard today for archiving magnetic media is to make a flux image.

The media is treated as if it were an analog recording and sampled at such a high rate that the smallest details are captured. Interpretation is done later, in software. The only antique electronics involved are often the tape or drive head, directly connected to a high speed digitizer.

And indeed that appears to be the plan Al Kossow has for the tape: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-November/032765.htm...

As for CDs, I don't see the rush; the ones that were properly made will likely outlast human civilization.

Just anecdata, but I had this concern when I worked in academia and we backed up all our data to writable DVDs. I was there 10 years after the start of the project and I periodically checked the old DVDs to make sure they weren't corrupted.

After 10 years, which was longer than the assumed shelf life of writable/rewritable DVDs at the time, I never found a single corrupt file on the disks. They were stored in ideal conditions though, in a case, in a closed climate controlled shelf, and rarely if ever removed or used.

Also, just because I think it's funny, the archive was over 4000 DVDs. (We had a redundant copies of the data compressed and uncompressed, I think it was like 3000 uncompressed 1k compressed) there was also an offsite redundant copy we put on portable IDE (and eventually SATA) drives.