Jeff Woods writes in regards to getting spare parts:

> They won't get them and will retire the ancient beasts in favor of some
>  newer, bigger, faster, cheaper, smaller, more compatible device...  Just
>  like everyone always does with old computer gear.  And I suggest that folks
>  find a way to copy those archive tapes to newer media *before* the old
>  drive (and the old media :) fail.

Jeff's recommendation should be taken to heart. Just a week or so ago, we
retired our second to last Classic machine, a micro XE. In attempting to
transfer over all of our archived tapes onto DDS, I loaded several of our
archived tapes that hadn't been read since they were written six years prior
-- and I was surprised and disappointed to find that I couldn't read any of
them if they were of a certain brand.

The lubricant on the tape had congealed and had become a sticky goo. When I
attempted to run these tapes through the 7970E, they squealed and cracked and
all eventually failed when the tape up drive couldn't generate a sufficient
amount of torque to break the adhesion of the tape layers on the supply reel.

No matter how many times I forced the tape drive to directly run the tape from
supply to takeup, without going through the normal tape path, I couldn't
loosen the tape sufficiently to get it to read. There was nothing wrong with
the magnetic information written on the tape. It was just sticky -- and it was
leaving all of its goo on all of the component pieces of the tape drive as it
went through the read path.

Luckily, there was nothing on the tapes other than some archived customer
databases. While I would have liked to have moved these databases over to the
918 that replaced the micro, it wasn't a catastrophic loss.

But the moral is: you can never be sure old media and old drives. In this
case, the spirit (the software) was willing, but the flesh (the hardware) was
weak. It pays to reincarnate the hardware every so often.

Wirt Atmar