9-Track Open Reel Tape Production Ends This Year

Robogeek writes: "eMag, the last maker of 9-track open-reel tapes, has announced that it will cease production of the product in 2002. The full story is here. The end of an era. We just packed up and shipped off our last 9-track mainframe drive for scrap. The thing was the size of a refrigerator, but when we had a bank of 9 of them going full-blast it sure gave the place a cool sci-fi feel. No more spin-spin, whir-whir... (sigh) 'Please stop, Dave. My mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it ...'"

Risk of historical loss

[JoeBuck]

In the mid-80s, 9-track tape was pretty much the standard medium used to archive data. That's what Henry Spencer used, for example, to save the Usenet traffic of the 80s. I wonder how much history will be lost as all these tapes become unreadable.

Memories

[alsta]

I remember having to use cotton swabs and alcohol to clean the heads of those things every few days. Other than that, they were pretty sturdy. I can't think of one 8mm drive that has lasted as long as one of our recently retired 9-track machines did.

They don't make 'em as they used to anymore, son.

I've used them

[renehollan]

...waaay back in 1979-1981

I even remember older 7 track tapes, and going from 1600 bpi (bits per inch) to 6250 bpi. I may still have a copy of my Masters' thesis lying around on one (in a proprietary mark-up format: Formal (Hi AJWM!)). Fat lot of good it does.

Converting old 9-track tapes to something better

[Old time hacker]

I have a bunch of old 9-track tapes that have potentially useful data on them. I guess I had better get moving on converting them to something more readable. Now I need to find somebody with a 9-track tape drive!

On topic: I can recall using magnetic powder sprinkled on tapes to see where the block gaps were. Then you could use a ruler to measure the size of the blocks, and convert to byte (by multiplying by the density). This gave you a head start in getting the JCL DD statement right for the tape. FB/80/800!

Re:Other retired media?

[gimple]

There was an article [wired.com] in Wired [wired.com] in 1999 that is about the dirty little secret in corporate America. The secret? A lot of companies are still using punch cards for critical applications. It is a good read.

Personally, I will sorta miss that "thwupp!" sound when the tape drive grabbed the tape to feed it onto the take-up reel. (Okay, not really, but I wanted to somehow work in the fact that I had used 9-track.)

Re:Other retired media?

[Singer4096]

A quick search revealed this site: Western Numerical Control [westnc.com] a company which apparently still makes paper tape and sells readers and punchers too.

What's an acceptable replacement?

[Anonymous Coward]

9-track tapes are designed for long-term storage. You put your data on one of those, and if you follow the proper procedures for storing it and retensioning the tape every few years and so on, you can be pretty sure that the data will still be readable 30 years later. Even more important than long storage lifetime with appropriate maintenance is that the storage lifetime and required maintenance to achieve long lifetime are know and well-defined. That's a critical feature in some applications - important enough to make it worth dealing with the other less pleasant aspects of 9-track technology.

On one of my co-op terms I copied a bunch of remote sensing data from 9-track to 8mm cartridges. I sure hope they kept the 9-track originals, because those will still be readable today. The 8mm tapes aren't - the stored data degrades after 5 to 10 years under the (admittedly non-optimal) conditions where we were using the tapes. CD-R is supposed to last for decades, but we don't know that it really does yet; there may be problems yet to be discovered with dyes fading, drives spinning discs too fast so that they break (52x CD-ROM drives have been observed to do that), or drives becoming unavailable because they've all been replaced with "secure" audio media For The Artists' Protection.

That scientific data will still be valuable to researchers for at least a hundred years. My ex-employers can re-copy it if necessary, but they don't have the budget to do that very often, and they want to be very sure that they know exactly how often it has to be re-copied to maintain a specified level of reliability. Properly used 9-track archive tapes are acceptable in that application. I don't know of any other medium that is. So within a very limited field, 9-track appears to me to be state of the art today.

I hope there's some acceptable replacement available today, or that there will be before the stocks of blank tapes run out.

Re:9 track tapes are hardly dead

[dragononthepotomac]

A number of companies including Imation still make reel tapes. The whole thread is based on nothing but some bogus advertising. The US Government consumes sufficient reel to reel tapes for classified pieces of equiptment for which output tapes must be destroyed instead of reused to keep the market viable for a few years. http://www.imation.com/en_US/products/product_fami ly_generic_1.jhtml?Id=IM_FAM184

Re:Which SCSI?

[Wdomburg]

>If it's SCSI-1 that the tape drive requires, you
>might have a challenge getting a host adaptor
>capable of talking to it :-).

Actually, one of the beauties of SCSI is that it is fully forwards and backwoards compatible; i.e. to SCSI-1 devices should work on an Ultra320 bus, and vice versa.

Mind you, plugging an SCSI-1 device into the bus will limit it to single-ended narrow speeds, so you wouldn't ever want to mix it with new devices, but it will in fact work.

In fact the only external CD-ROM I had for years was an old 1x SCSI, and I've run on machines up to Ultra160.

Matt