Library of Congress Racing to Preserve Quad Videotape

If you’ve never heard of 2″ Quadruplex videotape don’t feel bad. Introduced in 1956, it was the first commercially viable videotape format and was by-and-large the industry standard through the mid-1970s. As The Washington Post reports, moving image archivists at the Library of Congress and elsewhere are racing against time to try to preserve thousands of 2″ quad tapes. Reportedly, fewer than 100 machines capable of playing quad tapes remain in working order today. The Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center apparently has 27 machines but only two that work.

Despite the fact that so many 2″ Quad tapes exist today, countless others are gone forever. As I’ve mentioned before, the vast majority of the first eight or so years of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson no longer exist, the videotapes having been either erased and reused or simply destroyed. Many of the 2″ Quad tapes that have survived are in bad shape and need a lot of work to transfer to another format or to digitize.

I don’t have a lot of experience with 2″ Quad but the tapes I’ve handled were huge and heavy, the single machine I’ve seen massive (and unfortunately not in working order). If you’re interested in learning more about the format, check out the Quad Videotape Group.


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