Magnetic tape viewer

[Dave Britten]

(03-05-2020 08:54 PM)SlideRule Wrote:  

(03-05-2020 03:57 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  … could actually extract the data bit for bit …

for the HP-65, YES.

BEST!
SlideRule

Cool, I'm tempted to buy this modern equivalent to use with my 65 program cards (among other things).

https://store.arnoldmagnetics.com/produc...wer-b-1022

I wonder if it would do anything useful with old floppy disks, or if the data density is too high.

(03-05-2020 09:17 PM)Jake Schwartz Wrote:  Back in the 1970s, there was a liquid version of this viewer, called "Magna See" which did the same thing, and this assisted the early PPC "pioneers" decoding the HP65 and HP67 instruction sets by applying the liquid to visualize the tracks on the mag cards. This discussion thread reminds me of that 1964 Sci-fi flim "First Men in the Moon", where American astronauts landed on the moon, only to find a British flag already on the surface, having been placed there many decades before :-)

Jake

It looks like there's actually a thin layer of a liquid suspension inside the viewer. Is it essentially the same stuff?