Dec Rainbow prehistory

On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 16:19, Fred N. van Kempen wrote: It gets worse! I *did* backups. Now I certainly was dumb enough to delete old BIOS code (there were also liability issues; it wasn't my code), but here's the worst part: I had tape backup starting in the CP/M days (I wrote a start/stop DC300-type tape backup system for Alloy), went without for a small gap in the pre-hard-disk days of MSDOS (when 10MB RLL MFM drives cost actual money), then QIC and other formats, etc. So I'm merrily doing monthly dumps, rotating weekly dumps and often daily diff tapes, and got lax in checking the tapes afterwards... I didn't realize my tape drive had been drifting out of alignment(or something) until the 100MB hard disk crashed suddenly, and found I had lost my life's work. This was in 1993 or 94. I no longer do "backups". I take John Gilmore's advice, everything is on a rotating spindle in a machine on the net running syslog, etc. If one of the drives (etc) goes bad, it gets immediate attention like any operating computer does. Cron and rsync and ssh, machines separated 1500 miles apart. Four live, error-corrected copies of everything. Plus a few CDROM copies (as universal a medium as IBM3740, I'm sure). Plus I'm slowly printing on paper. The only stuff I have left that's "old" is 6800 code I wrote for my SWTPC, a 7-track magtape filesystem and executive (it's godawful, filled with embarrassments and horrors, but it was interrupt driven, very clever) which was printed on good old lineprinter paper. I can take a hint. Use good paper, good ink. Maybe I shoudl punch a few thousand kilometers of tape?