Article written by: Rosemary Picado
They say one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. And wow, did Kay Savetz, Program Manager of Special Collections at the Internet Archive, find a treasure when someone alerted them to a post on eBay. It listed a box of 10-inch Ampex tapes from the 80s, found at a property sale.
The post didn’t name the contents of the tapes, but if the labels were correct, they contained lost recordings of “The Famous Computer Café,” the first radio program about the burgeoning personal computing field. Created and produced by Andrew Velcoff, Michael FireWalker, and Ellen Fields, the show featured computer industry news, product reviews, and interviews from luminaries such as Bill Gates, Timothy Leary, Atari’s Jack Tramiel, Apple’s Bill Atkinson, and more. It was produced from 1983-1986 and aired on southern and central California radio stations.
Ampex 456 tapes are always valuable to recording enthusiasts, because even when they are used, they can be reused for new recordings. But if the labels on these tapes were correct, they could be a priceless historical record of the early days of the computer industry.
Kay took a gamble.
As they described on the Radio Survivor podcast (#342 – The Famous Computer Café), they gambled $1,000 on the eBay sale for the tapes, unsure of whether they included the shows described on the labels—or if they were playable at all. “The tapes might have been recorded over, or erased, in the 40 years since the show aired. The seller had no way of knowing. I felt like I was putting my money on a roulette table, it was such a risk,” Kay said.
Once Kay got the tapes, they still could not listen to them, as they were 10-inch NAB tapes, and they only had a 7-inch reel player. The condition looked good, but there was no way to tell without the right equipment. Kay launched a GoFundMe to pay for the professional transfer and reached out to Steve Roberts of Harbor Digitizing in San Juan Island, WA for the job.
Thankfully, Kay’s gamble paid off. Some of the tapes had “sticky tape” syndrome, but only one tape was unplayable. The other thirty plus were in great shape and contained 53 episodes of the lost radio show!
“It sounded like it was recorded yesterday,” Kay said. “I’d like to reiterate: these tapes were 40 years old, but they sounded so good. The audio sounded like they were just recorded, nice fidelity, little noise. I was so impressed at how well they fared.”
When asked about digitizing the tapes, Steve Roberts said, “The basic process uses the Otari MX-5050 deck routed through MOTU interfaces to Audacity on a Mac. Editing was minimal, with just head/tails trim and in some cases normalization to -3dB. In a couple I tweaked adjacent sections (like commercial vs. program) to even up levels… but noise level was vanishingly low, and the quality was beautiful.”
You can listen to the recovered episodes of the “Famous Computer Café” at the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/famous-computer-cafe.
But the search is still on! If you have access to other episodes of “Famous Computer Café” on tape, please contact Kay Savetz.