Vhs Tape Internet Archive

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The IBM Tape portfolio provides an array of choices to best suit the client requirements. From single drive entry levels all the way to scale up infrastructure. Here is a highlight review of the options currently available.

A tar (tape archive) file format is an archive created by tar, a UNIX-based utility used to package files together for backup or distribution purposes. It contains multiple files (also known as a tarball) stored in an uncompressed format along with metadata about the archive. Tar files are not compressed archive files. They are often compressed with file compression utilities such as gzip or bzip2.

Each file object includes any file data, and is preceded by a 512-byte header record. The file data is written unaltered except that its length is rounded up to a multiple of 512 bytes. At the end of the archive file there are two 512-byte blocks filled with binary zeros as an end-of-file marker. The file header record contains metadata about a file. To ensure portability across different architectures with different byte orderings, the information in the header record is encoded in ASCII. Tar archives are fully compatible between UNIX and Windows systems because all header information is represented in ASCII. See Notes for more information about the capitalization of tar and Unix.

The tar file format has changed over time as additional functionality has been developed for the tar UNIX utility leading to format extensions that include additional information for necessary implementations beginning in the 1980s. Early versions of tar formats were inconsistent in how numeric fields were constructed that were corrected in later implementations to improve portability of the format, beginning with the first POSIX standard for tar file formats in 1988.

The POSIX.1 2001 standard also features changes to the applicable typefield values. This extended tar or tar.h archive format stores new data in ustar-compatible archive entries that use "x" or "g" typeflags. FreeBSD, an open source Unix-like operation system, provides documentation of tar file format versions and stresses the compatibility between extended tar formats and ustar tar archives defined in the POSIX.1 1988 standard. "older implementations that do not fully support these extensions will extract the metadata into regular files, where the metadata can be examined as necessary." The POSIX.1 2001 standard defined the pax utility and pax format that serves as an extension of the tar format. The pax utility uses "-x" in the command string to output the archive format as ustar. Opengroup.org's Pax documentation clarifies that the pax utility supports the ustar format, defined as, "The tar interchange format; see the EXTENDED DESCRIPTION section. The default blocksize for this format for character special archive files shall be 10240. Implementations shall support all blocksize values less than or equal to 32256 that are multiples of 512."

The tar file format doesn't feature native data compression, so tar archives are often compressed with an external utility such as; gzip, bzip2, XZ (using 7-Zip / p7zip LZMA / LZMA2 compression algorithms), Brotli, Zstandard, and similar tools to reduce the archive's size for portability and data backup. Resulting compressed files can be found named with single extension, e.g. tgz, tbz, txz, tzst, or with double file extension, e.g. tar.gz, tar.br, tar.bz2, tar.xz, tar.zst

No specific features in the file format. Features to support accessibility would be found in the bundled and compressed files (such as embedded captions and subtitles in audiovisual content, tagged and structured text in textual documents, and alt text for images). Aggregate files can also contain separate files for transcripts, timed text or captions as part of the bundled package. See Relationships to other formats for details.

Tar can reference both the UNIX command to great the archive file format as well as the file itself, both with a lowercase spelling. The POSIX 2001.1 standard references the file format as the extended tar or "tar.h" file format while the IEEE 1988 Standard Interpretation defines the file format as "tar" in lowercase as well. For clarification purposes, when referencing the file format, this format description document will use "tar files" or the "tar file format."

The term UNIX generally refers to the licensed operating systems developed in 1996 and trademarked by the Open Group (link via Internet Archive). The Linux Information Project helps to provide comprehensive information about Linux and other free software but specifically explains how UNIX is defined and appropriate capitalizations of the term. Throughout this document, upper case UNIX refers to the trademarked operating systems. As described in the Linux Information Project's description, "Unix-like" or "UNIX-like" "is commonly used as a generic term referring to all operating systems that incorporate the major features of the early versions of UNIX, whether or not they officially call themselves UNIX or use the UNIX trademark. It is a broader term than Unix in the sense that the addition of the word -like eliminates any claim or implication that any system is UNIX (regardless of how UNIX might be defined, or spelled), and instead merely indicates that a system resembles the original UNIX systems. Thus, it is better at avoiding the controversial issues regarding what is, or can legally be called, UNIX, or Unix."

Early tar formats contained various inconsistencies within numeric fields. Early implementations filled numeric fields with leading spaces, which was corrected by the IEEE (POSIX.1) 1003.1-1988 standard where numeric fields were filled with leading zeroes for better portability.

The POSIX.1 2001 standard introduced the "extended tar", tar.h, or pax format which added vendor-tagged or vendor-specific functionality. This is the most flexible format with the richest features of other tar archive specifications. A thorough explanation of the POSIX.1 2001 standard and the tar.h format can be found in the Identification and Description section above.

GNU, a series of open-source software programs has it's own implementation of the tar utility (from versions 1.13.25) to create tar files dating to pre-POSIX tar formats, adding improvements such as incremental archives. According to GNU's comparison of tar iterations (link via Internet Archive) these features that were implemented make this tar format incompatible with other archive formats. GNU tar has the ability to read POSIX.1 2001 standard tar files.

Stokes is the subject of Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a new documentary that highlights her work as an archivist, but paints a complex picture of a woman who was brushed off as an eccentric for most of her life. For over 30 years, multiple tapes (sometimes as many as eight) would record concurrently across multiple televisions as Stokes personally watched two monitors at once. If she was attending gatherings or running errands, her outings would end abruptly when she had to go home to change out the tapes. Her obsessive work furthered her isolation from friends and relatives, as well as her son Michael Metelits, adding to the mystery as to why she undertook and continued such an ambitious project.

Initially, I was just intrigued by the idea of trying to grapple with an archive that kind of has everything and anything. I liked the idea of fuzzy degrading aesthetic of VHS tapes and so I was drawn to it for those artistic and conceptual reasons, but as I learned more about Marion, I recognized how unusual and fascinating a character she is. As I was making the film I found myself gravitating more and more to her personal story and trying to figure out how the archive illuminated that and vice versa.

One of the more striking parts of your documentary is the news coverage of 9/11. You juxtapose reports from CNN, ABC, CBS, and Fox News and play the real time coverage on the morning of 9/11. What made you decide to do something like that, and with that event in particular?

We wanted to use the footage in a few ways. One was to actually show historical events like the Iranian Hostage Crisis; another was to show these marginal histories in little capsules and to collage material from the tapes almost like video art. We wanted to figure out how to use this material to show the depiction of news in real time. We also wanted to treat an event that everybody is familiar with but to show it to them and to help them experience it in an unfamiliar way.

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