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Vietnam Battle Intelligence Computer data tapes Part 2 of 3

19 November 2014

In part 1 of this Blog I talked about the Vietnam Battle Intelligence Computer which was used by 1 Australian Task Force at Nui Dat in 1971.  This had resulted in a set of tapes called DECtapes being used for data storage.  In 1987 these tapes were backed up onto a 9 Track tape in Canberra.  In this part of the Blog I will be talking about the process of retrieving data from these tapes.

A single 9 Track backup tape had ended up with the Memorial as part of Official Records Series AWM347.  This was its description:

[Directorate of Military Intelligence] Vietnam Data 15 Oct 1987 [Memorex MRX V computer 9 track reel to reel tape, 63 files, Rec=80, bpi 1600, Block = 4000]

This didn’t mean a lot to us and lacking any 1970-1980s era computers we were unable to read it.  A long and rather unproductive search across various Government Departments resulted in lots of being told “You need to try Dept X”, but not a lot of progress.  Finally a breakthrough came with the Australian Computer Museum Society in Sydney.  They had the right equipment, but due to the need to relocate, they were not in a position to read the tape; however they had the contact that could.  They provided me with the details of a data recovery business called Spectrum Data in Perth.  Crossing my fingers I contacted them and found to my relief that they could still read 9 track tapes, in fact it was one of their specialities.

From that point onwards things progressed rapidly.  By coincidence, I am a Perth boy and happened to be travelling back there for a holiday.  So tape in hand, and one argument with Airport Security later, I attended the offices of Spectrum Data in Leederville.  I met with Guy Holmes the Director of Spectrum and he introduced me to a very enthusiastic Jamie Lomax their “Low density transcription manager” who gladly took the tape.  Jamie had in fact been looking forwards to receiving the tape, the Vietnam intelligence data it held promised to be more interesting than the Geological data that is most often retrieved from 9 Track tapes these days.

Spectrum Data proved to be just the right people to retrieve the data as the tape was “Sticky”.  Sticky tapes are bad, anyone who is old enough to remember their cassette tape being eaten by their car stereo can attest to this.  It is excess moisture retained by the tape that makes them sticky.  Spectrum Data had a process to heat the tapes, and through this process excess moisture is driven off.  This helps make the tape more readable for a short period of time, during which the data is read and stored on other media.  Through this process over 90% of the data was retrieved from the tape, this was an excellent result.

One of the three additional 9 Track tapes.  Photo provided courtesy of Museum of Australian Military Intelligence, Canungra

Thinking that may be the end of it I returned to Canberra, only to find that three other 9 Track tapes had been located by Captain Dennis Magennis, Manager of the Museum of Australian Military Intelligence at Canungra.  He had also located the original DECtapes in his storage.  To cut a long story short, these were all kindly donated to the Memorial and the three 9 Track tapes went off to Spectrum Data (by courier this time).  Jamie worked his usual magic and managed to recover all of the data they held.  Two were duplicates of the other tape, and the third held SPAR reports which were missing from the other tapes (the SPAR reports were Secret at the time the data was created).

The resultant data was as complete as can be, unfortunately it was found that some of the data had been corrupt when it was originally written to the tapes, and a few months of data had never been backed up to the tapes.  We had the original DECtapes which covered this missing data, so sent them off in anticipation; unfortunately the over 40 year old DECtape appears to be a format that nobody can read in 2014.  However we determined that approximately 95% of the original data had been retrieved and therefore we considered the whole activity to be a great success.

DECtapes received from the Museum of Australian Military Intelligence.  Photo provided courtesy of Museum of Australian Military Intelligence, Canungra

If the casual reader is wondering why so much effort was undertaken to retrieve what is ostensibly 40 year old computer data the reason is not just that it is an official record; it is more that it represents the first digital official records that we have created by Australian units in the field.  Effectively this is the first computerised database recorded by Australians while at War.

So where is this data now, well that will be the topic of part 3 of this Blog.

Last updated: 30 March 2021

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