I recently inherited some relics that my dad saved from his software company in the 70's. Among them is this tape that I believe contains COBOL source code for software that ran on Burroughs mainframes.

Two questions for folks a little earlier to the computer scene than I was:

1) What do you think the chances are that this tape could still be read?

2) Any recommendations as to where I should send it to try to recover a copy of the data and what it might cost?

For reasons far more sentimental than practical, I'd love to be able to at least see some of the code that he wrote back in the day if it ends up being at all feasible.

5-1/4 were way later than particular tape. We used 8 inch floppies back in the day.  I was in charge of the SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU archives for a while during the 90s and we had similar tapes from the late 60s and early 70s. The data was duplicated on multiple tapes and stored in an atmosphere controlled room the entire time. My observations are that when asked to recover a single file, we were successful about 25% of the time.

The bigger problem is finding the right hardware/software to read the tape. Each manufacturer had their own quirks and created proprietary drivers for the operating systems of the day. This is a very deep rabbit hole. I was lucky because we still had the tape machines and a few old mainframes we could read them on.

Best of luck.