Before we embarked on a massive project to copy old tapes onto new tapes and invested effort into developing software to translate the data into a more meaningful format, we examined some of the alternative solutions. The main requirement for any solution was that it had to work for the tapes containing data from the Incompatible Timeshare System (ITS), which is the oldest and most eccentric operating system that was in production use at the Labs. Any design that can accommodate ITS can easily be adapted for any Unix, DOS, Genera, or TOPS-20 data. These are the options that were considered before we decided to develop our own: