What BS. An ancient handwriting recorder has as much to do with the iPad as does pencil and paper.

Last year I got given a QIC-150 tape written in 1995 to see if I could recover someone's old email archives. First I had to locate a QIC drive but a bit of hunting on the local Freecycle group got me an external SCSI unit weighing about 40 pounds with a tape drive and a full-height 500MB hard drive included. The tape drive didn't work, in that it talked SCSI-II all right to the BSD box's controller and the motor went round and round but no data came out.

The first inkling of bad news was realising that someone else had been into the tape drive mechanism before me when I saw the chewed-up screws holding the covers on. The really bad news was seeing the capstan roller on the drive -- or rather the motor shaft where the capstan roller used to be. It had gone missing sometime in the past and the bodger who had been in before me figured that a bunch of rubber bands would make a suitable replacement for the roller. This was some time back, judging by the condition of the rubber bands which were now a sticky mess of perished semi-liquid rubber.

I rummaged in my junkbox and pulled out an old lump of solid rubber, a platen roller from a daisywheel printed I had junked decades ago. I measured up the motor shaft, made some educated guesses and machined a replacement roller on the workshop lathe. After degunking the motor shaft with a scalpel and needle files the new capstan roller was driven into place and after that the data came pouring off the tape like it had been written yesterday as good old-fashioned CSV-delimited tarball archives. The owner of the tape got back the first emails he ever exchanged with the lady who he had since married and there was much rejoicing.

ah its 10 % more expensive.