Slashdot Mirror
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 ...'"
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.
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!
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.