Strange recording / large reel

[Kevin Ellis]

Didn't really know the best subject heading to give this but here's the details.

i have a 10.5" reel with 1/4" tape and 3" centre that I am unable to play due to the limitations of the player, ie spool is too big.

Although I did a test play by hooking up a Heath Robinson style contraption and reel, I didn't want to chance too much or risk damage to the tape

When played for the few second the tape seems to have what appears to be a digital signal, similar to the old dial up noise of modems.

the tape has the following hand written on Tachen I tape 6b 22-8-68, nothing else is written on the tape or box. The tape is EMItape type B21/36N

So my question is what do I have? 

Thanks for any thoughts
Kevin

[Simon Collis]

It's possible it's an old mainframe tape I suppose. But what I don't know. It might be worth talking to someone with a vintage setup who can recover the info - people connect old PDP drives to modern PCs to grab the contents, for example - but you'd have to delve into the world of emulation for that. (I used to know someone who ran his own suite of Alphas in his garage and made a good side income renting time on them too...)

Try looking round www.old-computers.com/ maybe, see if you can identify anything that used similar looking tapes?

[Stephen Byers]

Send an image to the National Computer Museum at Bletchley Park.

www.tnmoc.org/about-us/contact-national-museum-computing

The National Museum of Computing
Block H
Bletchley Park
MILTON KEYNES
MK3 6EB
Tel: [phone]
[e-mail]

[Simon Collis]

What Stephen said.

-1 to self for not thinking of that!

[Kevin Ellis]

I'll do that, thanks.

[Stephen Byers]

Huh, I just sent them an email re: a donation I have to make, actually a mint ZX80, however the email bounced due to their mailbox being full and having exceeded its quota.

[Kevin Ellis]

I'll give it a few days :-D

[RWels]

It's not simply the largest size audio reel? I mean, there were the 3 sizes or so for the regular band recorders, but there was also an extra large one that would only fit on (semi) professional equipment.

[richardwoods]

If you could find someone with a Revox reel to reel set up with the spool adaptors that would play the tape, but it won't help you that much if it's not audio. It could be an archive recording of fax signals or something similar. Who knows. Could be difficult to find out I guess.

[RWels]

Could you perhaps post a copy?

If it was an audio cassette, it could simply be commodore programs. I was told that back in the day these were sometimes aired on radio, so you could record the beeps. In theory someone could have recorded that on audio reel?

It's just a very wild stab in the dark, mind.

[Dale Rumbold]

All the mainframe tapes (pre cartridge) that I came across when working in computing were 1/2" tapes, not 1/4" : in fact a colleague once purchased a load of them that were being junked and pain-stakingly sliced them down the middle into 2 lots of 1/4", so he use them on his reel-to-reel recorder, only to find that they were Lowest-of-the-low-Fi and virtually unusable.

[Kevin Ellis]

I'll try and record a minutes worth with my rig, may take a while though :-D

[RWels]

Oct 10, 2016 19:42:10 GMT Kevin Ellis said:

I'll try and record a minutes worth with my rig, may take a while though :-D

Actually when I said copy I meant a picture. My mistake. Although a sample of the audio would of course also be interesting (in a mysterious way).

[Kevin Ellis]

[Peter Stirling]

What you may have is a slide show control tape?
The Kodak 2050 slide projector could be arranged in banks of 3 up to a 100 or more to give dynamic slide show presentations involving fades, dissolves, multi picture and what not with interfaces getting instructions from a tape with a program on.