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Comment by CliffStoll | Hacker News Reader

My 1980 dissertation research on the scattering properties of Jupiter's upper atmosphere is in my attic, stored on a 2400 foot reel of 9-track tape, 1600 bits per inch, NRZI, if I remember right.

Maybe 40 Mbytes of data. It's archived with the write-ring removed.

Somehow, I don't think I'll try to rebuild the scattering matrix for Jovian cloud particles...

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You need to transfer that ASAP to some SyQuest drives. Baby steps.

it would fit easily on audio tape using an 8-bit retro computer more than likely. Babier steps!

Those bad boys (9-track tapes) could easily hold 40MB which was a few hundred times bigger than floppy discs of the 8-bit age and would add up to quite a few compact cassettes. (As expensive as it was, I was so happy to switch to floppy disk for my TRS-80 Color Computer because restoring stuff I saved on a cassette was always hit or miss.)

Mainframes in 1968 were handling much bigger data sets than you could handle with a micro until 1990 or so.

Helical-scan VHS tapes could hit over 2MB per inch, which is crazy dense. The feed mechanism is a lot more mechanically rough on the tape though.

There is no way you could fit 40MB into an audio tape, even when using the fastest fast loader [1]. 40MB is 3.2e8 bits, which means you'd need a transfer rate of ~60kbps even with a 90-minute tape. 8 bit computers could do 1-2kbps at best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_loader

Makes me a little sad to think of it gradually succumbing to bit rot, even though I know everything does and I don't mind that some of my own data is going the same way. If you want to preserve it I bet it wouldn't be too hard to rustle up volunteers to try to retrieve and transfer it.

Bit rot, tapes are extremely prone to actual physical rot too.

I have always wanted to put a modern LTO head on one of those giant reel to reel tapes. Probably wouldn’t work right, but if it did it would be awesome.

I suspect your book has a bigger importance, right?

The number of people who have read my dissertation would fit into a bus shelter.

Oh la-de-dah look at Mr. Popular here.

Or, more optimistically, a very large Klein bottle.

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