20 Mar
2005
20 Mar
'05
9:08 a.m.
On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 11:55:42 -0500 (EST), William Donzelli
<aw288 at osfn.org> wrote:
The story I heard about NASA data retrieval issues from someone
who was involved with the project to later convert old media to
new, had nothing to do with manned missions... the ground-based
data that was collected from the rig that bounced a laser off of
the tray of bicycle reflectors on the moon, recorded to 7-track
tapes. One of my collegues described setting up a PDP-11
with a SCSI controller and supervising a grad student as they
ran something on the order of 45,000 lbs of 7-track tape through
the machine and onto a drawer of 8mm tapes.
I was told the story in 1995... not sure exactly when it was
supposed to have taken place, but sometime after 8mm tapes
were in common use (we were using Exabyte 8505s at the
time, FWIW).
-ethan
The key is to
always keep
a bit ahead of the problem rather than waiting until
the problems such as NASA has with old tapes that
can no longer be read with tape drives that rarely
work in any case.
This is a myth. Every bit of every mission is available on CD-ROM. The
original telemetry tapes are crap, but the data was pulled off them many
years ago.