On Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 12:21:41PM -0500, David Ryskalczyk via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Yes, a drive with a 7-track head, or a 7-track head for a swappable drive such as the Qualstar 1052, would be needed.
That said — doesn't the Univac that is present in the museum itself have a working 7-track drive?
Last I heard it wasn't working well. Is my information out of date? Don't know if it was the drive or control. People working with the Univac had also made modern interfaces to the Univac NTDS interfaces so might be able to write a "simple" program to dump tapes through that if drives are working. There was some discussion on using head from IBM 3480/3490? to read 7 tracks. Couldn't find what I remembered online and not cheap to acquire. I did recently pick up a 7 track head but its in bad shape so not sure if it is usable.