Electronics | Owen's Tech

We recently went though all of my grandparent’s VHS & Betamax tapes, and you guessed it, I took some. Most of the tapes have nothing important on them, but the good ones I’ll convert to digital (and save the original tape of course). Anyway, I got one blank and brand new master production quality VHS tape that was sealed, but I opened it because I couldn’t resist holding a brand new master tape VHS tape. I still feel bad about it though. Speaking of new tapes, I got a new Betamax tape that is still in it’s original packaging. I also got two cleaning tapes, one for VHS and one for Beta. And yes, I also got a Betamax player, but it still technically belongs to my grandparents. It will just live at my house, which means I can use it whenever.

The cleaning tapes (Beta left, VHS right).

The master quality VHS tape in it’s case.

The master quality VHS tape.

The new Betamax tape

The front of the Betamax player

The annoyingly spaced RCA ports on the back of the Beta player.

I recently picked up more old miscellaneous tech items for free. I got another old PoE switch, a UPS, an ancient server, and an ATX power supply (those are universally useful). I also got a broken robotic tape library. A robotic tape library is a thing that holds 50+ LTO tapes. It is basically a robot hand designed to pick up tapes and put them in tape drives. LTO tapes are like a hard drive and a VHS tape combined. So yeah, the tapes are ways of storing files. The only difference is that they can hold insane amounts of files. Each tape is about 8 TB. Sadly there is a big downside. It takes a very long time to write to LTO tapes making them only useful for computer backups and archiving. I will post more updates about the salvaged components from the tape drive, the “new” server, and will post updates about the PoE switches once those darn fans are delivered.