Out in the garage or up in a closet, packed away with your high school yearbooks and your father’s golf clubs, are memories.
Do you still have the equipment to watch that 8 mm movie of your son’s first steps or to listen to the reel-to-reel recording of your grandmother’s voice? Or does that shoebox contain only unplayable artifacts of dead technologies?
Americans have used hundreds of formats for audio and visual recordings since World War II. When the original playback equipment broke down, those recordings became unplayable for many.
To rescue those memories, the first thing you’ve got to do is find a working machine–even one that’s barely working–that recognizes the old format. Sometimes you’ll have to go to a commercial service to get the work done, but often you can borrow a machine from a hobbyist or find one at a garage sale.Experts say to start first with the person who made the original tape, movie or files; he or she might still have a machine tucked away that can be patched together just long enough to make your transfers. Hobbyists hoard old cameras, tape decks and the like, so ask around.
Other sources are thrift shops, garage sales and newspaper ads. And the newest technology, the Internet, is one of the best places to look for retro tech. Try Web auction sites such as www.ebay.com.
Sometimes a little imagination and experimentation can help, too. For example, David Morton, research historian at the IEEE History Center/Rutgers Center for the History of Electrical Engineering at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., says that with magnetic audiotapes, “usually you can rig something up to play them. You can modify a reel-to-reel tape player to play almost anything, even an 8-track, if you take it out of its old cartridge.”
But Bruce Sterling, a science fiction novelist and moderator for the Dead Media Project, an Internet study group, cautions that no medium–including new digital formats–is permanent. Keep your originals; you may need them again.
Here is advice from the experts about retrieving data from some of the most popular home media formats of the past few decades:
– Reel-to-reel and 8-track audiotapes. “There are so many working reel-to-reel tape recorders out there that I think most people are able to pretty easily find a way to transfer them,” Morton says.
Mark A. Hauck, production coordinator/media services at Neumann College in Aston, Pa., explains the technique: “Most audio formats should have auxiliary jacks on the rear panel that say RECORD OUT/IN or AUX OUT/IN. The plugs that fit these jacks will either be RCA phono or quarter-inch phone. Connect the OUT jacks from the retro gear to the IN jacks of a good audiocassette, digital audiotape or mini-disc with standard RCA cables.
“If no jacks are offered on the retro gear, you must record the audio acoustically with a microphone placed near the playback speaker(s).”
– Apple IIe, IBM and other 5-inch drive computers. Many early personal computers, including Apple IIe and IBM formats, used 5-inch floppy disks to record information.
Tom Carlson, creator of the virtual Museum of Obsolete Computers, says, “You’ve got three different problems that occur when you’re trying to go from old stuff to new stuff. Step No. 1 is physical incompatibility: I’ve got a 5-inch disk and a 3-inch drive, and I can’t physically stick one in the other.
“The second level is the basic operating system incompatibility. It may be a Macintosh disk and my computer won’t read it. It could conceivably be a Commodore 64 disk or an old Atari disk. They’re just totally different formats.
“And then the third level is, even if you can get the data from one computer to the other, do you have anything that can read it? Your copy of Word isn’t going to be able to read those old word processor files.”
Modern computers can’t decipher Apple IIe disks, so your best bet for retrieving those files may be to find an old machine with a modem, save the files in ASCII format and send them to your new computer or to a bulletin board. Null modem cables connecting RS232 serial ports on each machine also may work using a terminal program, but you’ll have to tinker, Carlson says.
An Apple IIGS and some Macintosh PCs also can be used as a “bridge” to create an intermediate file.
“Unfortunately, there’s no one trick or method for all computers,” he says.
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For 5-inch disks in IBM-compatible format, you’ll need a drive, available at computer swap meets, by mail order or on the Internet.
The best solution, of course, is to be sure when you upgrade your computer that you don’t abandon an old medium before you’ve moved all your data. Even the experts get caught.
“It’s funny. I was going through some boxes and realized that I have a box of these things that I want transferred,” Morton says. “And just in the last year or so, I’ve gotten rid of the last computer I had that would do it. So now I’m stuck, too.”
– 8 mm home movies. As video recorders became popular in the 1980s, most camera shops and drugstore photo departments offered transfer of home movies from 8 mm to videocassette. The service is not as easy to find now.
Hauck says 8 mm films also can sometimes be transferred by photographers who videotape weddings. Or you can do it yourself: “Borrow a projector and display the image onto a white piece of matte board. Place your camcorder on a tripod and tape that image.”
Some mail-order catalogs also sell transfer boxes into which you put the lens of the projector, and the image is reflected past a mirror and into the lens of your video camera.
Brandon Rowe, sales and marketing director for On Video Inc. in Carrollton, Texas, says his company does professional transfers from 8 mm film to VHS video as well as DVD video–a step he suggests as a way to archive images.
“Digital is ones and zeros; the other is analog, which is magnetic,” he says. “They both use a magnetic media, but the difference is . . . analog will slowly fade over time. So let’s say you’ve taken a shot of the birth of your child 15 years ago. If you go back and look at that tape today, it’s going to be degraded and possibly, in some cases, may not even be recognizable. But digital is either there or it’s not. That’s going to be the longest lasting, purest form.”
Transfer costs for 8 mm are about 15 cents a foot, he says, and there’s a $50 set-up fee for a digital session, in which several film rolls may be processed. The digitized transfer can be used in many ways, including posting to the Internet.
“If it’s a short enough video,” Rowe says, “you could send it as an E-mail over the Internet to your grandmother, or you could post it on the Web and encode that video in video streaming format and go to the Web site to see it.”
– Wire recordings. These analog recordings, made on thin wire instead of magnetic tape, are captured and played on a special machine. Finding a working wire recorder is the trick. Morton says only 10,000 to 15,000 were sold annually, even in the peak years of 1948-49.
Once you have a working playback machine, the transfer can be as simple as putting a mike in front of the speaker.
“The audiophiles will tell you never to do that, but this is sort of a low-fi medium, and the results can be pretty good,” Dr. Morton says. “Or you can make a direct connection, which requires getting into the machine. You can pretty easily feed the output of the wire recorder into the input of a cassette deck.
“I’ve done it both ways, and the results are almost indistinguishable.”
– 78 and 45 rpm records. The same transfer methods used with magnetic tapes can be used with records: Use jacks from the old to the new, or just stick a mike in front of a speaker and turn on your cassette to capture the sound.
It’s wise to stash away your originals.
“A lot of those old shellac 78s will outlive magnetic tape by an order of magnitude because they’re not magnetically polarized,” Sterling says. “If they take a hit from a passing cosmic ray or something, it’s no problem.”
– Betamax video. Beta has survived as a professional medium, so tapes and equipment are readily available both from Sony and from the many hobbyists who have stuck by the format and still use it. Commercial movies also were issued in Beta, a Sony proprietary format.