Seen on RISKS-L

--- Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman(a)theestopinalgroup.com> wrote: No arguing with that, but I think this particular example is real. The problem is oversimplified and understated with the phrase "forgotton file format" - if I'm remembering the incident accurately, it was more a case of "obsolete media format" - 200 bpi *7* track tape, once common. I know that a friend of mine from the Ice worked on a project to digest metric tons of 2MT7 (not that it was ever called that, but as a label to differentiate it from the more common 16MT9) loaded with data from the Apollo program. IIRC, some of it was data pertaining to the laser reflectometer and how many wavelengths of light the moon is from us at any particular moment (an experiement which shows physical evidence the moon is still ringing like a struck bell from a "recent" impact, possibly one observed and documented 500 years ago in Europe and China). The rig they used (making this on-topic!) was a PDP-11 with a 7-track tape drive (don't know the model number) and an 8mm Exabyte drive, probably an 8200, but I don't know for certain. In between the tape drives, on the PDP-11 was some simple copying software and some slave labor^H^H^H^H^H^H^Ha graduate student. I don't have exact numbers, but it was on the order of several cubic meters of magtape distilled down to a file drawer of 8mm carts. Presumably, multiple copies were made and disseminated (one would hate to think all that work would end up on tapes that were never read again). I heard about this project during the 1995-1996 austral summer. -ethan P.S. - it was reminscent of the problems of reading the 1960 census. I'd heard that the only extant copy of the data was on microfilmed round-holed punch cards. Round-holed because that's the equipment (Univac?) they used for that census. Microfilmed because the climate controlled warehouse for that many punch cards for that many decades was getting too expensive to maintain. Various schemes were floated for recovering that data when the time came (since all census data is _eventually_ released, 70 years later in the case of details). In the end, I think, a 7 track tape copy of the data was found and read, obviating the need to OCR millions of microfilmed punch cards. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/