Why JBII is sole-sourced with NASA zero competition:
From the CEO John Bordynuik:
I have a few comments that might help explain the technology for
reading tapes.
There aren't any other companies doing it with any success, and this is why:
Other "tape transcribing and recovery" companies are using original equipment and this does a very poor
job. Original equipment is incapable of guaranteeing the data and in many
cases is unable to read the tapes. NASA and MIT have both been through this
so there is a solid reason why we are "sole sourced" as there is no other
source available. They did offer this to other data recovery companies but
none of them were able to produce. It is worth reporting that I was contacted
by other data recovery companies, using original equipment, asking to
license or purchase my drives. I passed their emails to NASA (which further
validated us) and refuse to license our technology out to the small recovery
shops.
Original 7-track drives were developed in the 1960s. They use
discrete components and lack modern amplifiers, head technology, and bit
detection technology. They are incapable of dealing with skew problems
(other than the skew settings set in the drive). The heads are old induction
heads. We designed new head assemblies based on modern MR-heads (found in
new hard disks). The signal amplitude in the old drives is dependent on
speed (hence induction head problems). Old tapes can't be streamed at 120
IPS. As well, old drives were often out of alignment. In addition, old
technology cannot deal with weak bits, bit dropout, and bit crowding.
The old drives are incapable of validating each flux transition to
ensure proper recovery. The analog waveforms were rectified through a full
wave bridge (hence no N->S and S->N validation) and then use a comparator to
clip the analog waveform at some set level. This technology is useless on
magnetic media today and was abandoned years ago.
Old tapes are brittle, the oxide is loosely bound to the tape, and
the binding material is often breaking down. The old "original" drives were
mostly vacuum column which is very harsh on the old tapes and destroys them
quickly.
There have been no replacement heads for the 7-track drives for the
past 25 years and the old induction heads do wear out. No one makes them and
old worn out heads are useless. Again, the old head technology is not
useable.
If someone over at IBM Research believes original equipment is
capable of reading the old tapes, I would love to discuss this further with
them. I know engineers over at the IBM Almaden Research Center and I know
those who are a part of the Computer History Museum and DEVELOPED the
original technology do agree that original equipment should not be used.
I do have plenty of examples. NASA tried to have 7-track tapes
migrated to 9-track tapes back in the early seventies. The result was a
disaster. The MRIR tapes are full of errors and problems not identified by
original equipment. Fortunately, I recovered their attempts to see how bad
it was. The images are available on JohnBordynuik.com which proves
how inaccurate and incapable original equipment is.
I hope this answers questions from those who believe you can
resurrect an old tape drive from 1970 and hook it up to an old mainframe and
attempt to read tapes -- it does not work and the World's largest technology
centers have certainly tried and agree with me.
We spent over $2 million developing this technology and a new bit
detection algorithm that is really successful. I am looking forward to many
large data migration projects.
I suggest visiting links to our presentations on our main web site
(www.johnbordynuik.com). They describe our technology in detail and why
original equipment can't read the data well and why ours does.
Regards,
John Bordynuik
CEO
