Software Recovery and Beyond

Discusses the information storage work done by the York University Computer Museum(YUCoM) in 2016. YUCoM received 32 cassette tapes created at a Toronto-based computer firm Micro Computer Machines (MCM) between 1974 and 1978. These tapes once contained software and data destined for the MCM/ 70 personal computer—possibly the earliest commercially manufactured PC (1974)—and its later upgrades and refinements. Despite the luck of detailed technical information about the tape storage organization adopted by MCM, YUCoM embarked on the MCM tape recovery and analysis project because the tapes might have still contained the earliest examples of personal software written for PCs, and that could shed some new light on this software genre’s development in its preindustrial stage.1 This article chronicles the MCM tape recovery and analysis project undertaken at YUCoM.