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Helping out with Whirwind tapes recovery
🕑 Added 2020-01-22 05:48:08 +0000 UTCI quickly made a centering hub for old Whirwind tape reels today. There is an ongoing CHM - MIT collaboration to retrieve data from Whirlwind, the 1950's mother of all supercomputers for which core memory was invented. We have a tape drive unit and a large collection of tapes. The drive is actually a Raytheon instrumentation recorder. The reels have a really weird hub. With the hub I made, Al Kossow (CHM, bitsavers.org) will be able to clean and respool the tapes, then recover the raw analog signal from a modified "modern" tape drive. Len Shustek (founder of the CHM) then analyzes Al's analog waveforms to recover the digital data. Finally Guy Fedorkow (MIT Museum) makes sense of it. He was able to run some recovered programs on his Whirlwind emulator!
