8mm data cartridges

[Dave Caroline]

I have some somewhere (exabyte) I shall go dig in a few days

Dave Caroline

On 5/8/07, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> How common were drives which could read these? I suspect the answer is "not
> very"! If anyone has one, how reliable was/is the media?
>
> I've got a couple of such Sony cartridges here dating from 1991; one does call
> itself a data cartridge (QG-112M) - the other one is a PAL/SECAM 90-minute
> Video8 tape (P5-90MP).
>
> Going from the labels, both have backups from some UNIX system on them - but
> (helpfully!) no clue as to what that system was or what backup program wrote
> them. From the huge box of floppies that I found them in though, I suspect
> that they might be from an Olivetti 3B2 - in which case they're possibly just
> tar dumps.
>
> I'm not sure what my chances are of finding a drive to read them are though
> (and worse still, such a drive might not be SCSI and so require a proprietary
> interface card and drivers). The packrat in me wants to try reading them
> rather than just tossing them out though :-)
>
> cheers
>
> Jules
>
>
>