On 8/1/25 08:26, David Schmidt via cctalk wrote:
Fred's advice is good here - many of these drives
are likely to be very important to archivists and preservationists (there are several of
us on this list) and not general-purpose "PC" devices. Chuck was an expert in
many things relating to magnetic storage, and a rare expert indeed in tape recovery.
(I'm not one of those. I sent all my tape inquiries Chuck's way.) I can't
imagine how I'd go about this, but we all should probably start thinking about
succession planning if we haven't yet. :-) Perhaps recruit people in his contacts
list to see if anyone is able to swing by and help sort into categories and subcategories
of interest? The entirety of this collection would be "a lot" for any one
person (or institution) to deal with, but being able to mete out portions to various
experts might help make it more manageable.
Chuck meant a lot to us here. We miss him deeply. My condolences to you and your
family.
Yes, they're very clearly not general-purpose PC devices, and I had a
pretty strong suspicion most of them were modified and/or valuable,
given some of the fragmentary notes I found...
On recruitment: that's a good suggestion, although I'm certainly not up
on who's an expert on what in this field!
We appreciate the condolences, and it's somewhat comforting to see just
how much he meant in this community.