As far as I can recall, DB, the cleaning fluid in the nice IBM pint
cans, was nothing more than denatured alcohol. IBM packaged it for those
shops that had an "all-blue" mandate from management as far as IT
equipment went....:-)
The stiff cotton swabs that you use to clean the head could be replaced,
I think, by some soft cotton fabric on a medical tongue depressor.
Thanks, too, for doing this recovery work.....are you going to put the
recovered tape files out anyplace for others to access?
DJ
David Boyes wrote:
Does anyone still know of a source that sells 3420 cleaning fluid and
supplies? In the process of working through these old tapes from
Princeton, I’m burning through the small supply I have of the stuff
rapidly (2 pints so far), and still have a few thousand tapes to go.
The amount of oxide flaking and just general destruction these tapes
have is amazing – gunk everywhere. Hats off to the data recovery folks –
I’d really hate to have to do this all the time. Freeze drying, careful
rereading, multiple retries… sheesh. Phase of the moon for some of these
volumes.
Pretty scary that the circa 1970s volumes actually seem to have a higher
readability index so far.
David Boyes
Sine Nomine Associates
