Hi Monty,
I'm really stunned by how much effort you put into this Tektronix stuff.
Maybe I'm completely wrong, but I have been searching on the forum, and there seem
to be just a few persons here which actively post something about these machines.
But when I do a search on Google I see many of these 405x machines...
I have asked the previous owner of my 4052 and he found 6 tapes.
But I have also read that there are many problems with these tapes.
Solved with plastibands etc...
Regards, Roland
Roland,
It is a labor of love.
I loved programming the 4051 computer at my first job out of University.
I collected a 4052 and a 4054 when I 'retired' in 1999.
I was only retired for a year and a half, and the 4052 and 4054 were set aside until a couple of years ago - when I got both working again and began to archive recovered tapes and 8-inch disks.
Recovering the DC300 tapes and automating the recovery to just running a recovery program on my PC that pulls all the tape records into a single file has been the latest journey.
I then decided to see if the two 4041 GPIB Controllers that I acquired when I retired were running - both are running and I have successfully recovered the System Verification tape that I got from Stan Griffiths in 2000!
Now I'm experimenting with the 4041's communicating with the 4052 and 4054
Back to tape recovery - on the 4041, there are no reports of user tapes - as this machine was designed to control Tektronix (and other vendor) GPIB equipment, such as factory test - including a small thermal printer for the results.
I purchased a box of DC6250 mini tape cartridges to make copies of the 4041 System Verification tape and some assorted size plastibands for drive belts.
I found I could not format either of two NOS tapes in shrink wrap from a box dated 1993. I checked the web and found folks with similar issues trying to use these tapes in HP computers. Recommendation was bake the tapes at low temperature for a couple of days in a dehydrator.
I had a dehydrator and tried the recipe on four of these tapes (removed broken drive belt, removed drive pulley, taped the reels together, baked the tape without the cover), and after two days was easily able to format and record the recovered System Verification files. Previous attempts - including recovery of the System Verification tape with a plastiband replacement resulted in having to clean the heads multiple times, replace the belt multiple times, but the 'baking' didn't have that issue.
If you are going to try to recover the 6 tapes - I would highly recommend baking them first.
If the tapes are Tektronix programs - post photos of the tape labels first, maybe I have already recovered them.
If they are user tapes, there could be interesting programs. I think the most interesting at this point are the games, and I have found user tapes with user programs and a couple of games - like my find of the Lunar Lander program.
If you don't have a dehydrator - you could send me the tapes and I would try to recover and post their files.
I have also invested time in porting games from other microcomputers of early 1980's like my two ports of different Adventure games to the Tektronix. One of them runs on all the 4050 computers with at least 32KB memory. The latest one was designed for a Commodore floppy drive, and since I am on the short list of 4050 owners with working 4907 floppy drives, that limits the applicability.
I believe that second version might be converted to run on 4050 tape (slow access time), but I think I will wait on that conversion until I get my 4050 Arduino Tape Emulator project working. I'm working with the author of the AR488 Arduino GPIB interface to try to convert his program to accept commands from the 4050 computers as secondary GPIB addresses. If successful, I plan to copy all my recovered programs into an SD (or microSD) flash drive in separate directories, so all (dozen or so) users of working 4050 computers can enjoy them as the DC300 tapes are super problematic.