ITC's Tape Reading Procedures

ITC is retiring tape reading services effective February 16, 2004 Please see the announcement at: Tape Reading Services to be Discontinued

ITC offers tape reading services to transfer data from tape to UNIX based accounts for all Faculty, Staff and Students at UVA.

General Tape Format Information

Tapes come in a variety of physical forms, data formats, and labeling.

Physically, the tapes we can process are:

8 mm cartridge (low and high density formats, with or without compression)
9-track, reel (800, 1600, 3200 and 6250 bpi densities)
IBM 3480 cartridge

NOTE: 8 mm cartridge tapes, with the data in ASCII format (with or without compression) is the easiest format for ITC to process.

Format choices for data are:

ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange
EBCDIC - Extended Binary-Coded-Decimal Interchange Code
UNIX TAR - Tape ARchiver (compressed format)

Note: ITC can also read UNIX CPIO and PAX compressed data formats

UNIX machines (and microcomputers) use ASCII; the mainframe uses EBCDIC. However, UNIX machines can store EBCDIC data and the mainframe can read ASCII tapes. Data may also come from IBM mainframes written in Packed-Decimal format. This is specific to IBM mainframe machines and may NOT be able to be read at UVA.

Tapes may be labeled (has electronic header/footer information for each file) or non-labeled. Generally, ASCII and TAR'd tapes are non-labeled, while EBCDIC tapes are often labeled.

A tape may contain a single file, or several files, each with its own characteristics. That is why the information on the second page of the "Tape Precessing Form" (Form 35A) is very important.

To download a copy of the Tape Precessing Form (Form 35A) in Microsoft Word 6.0 format - Click Here.