30 Aug
2006
30 Aug
'06
9:35 a.m.
On 8/30/2006 at 8:45 AM Zane H. Healy wrote:
Congratulations, both on getting it back and figuring
out one of the
key principles of archives. Always write them in a non-proprietary
format, label them correctly, and refresh at the media's half life.
Those are good guidelines, but the pattern for us is that we get something
that was stashed in storage and only turned up after a search through dusty
boxes. Most often, these things don't even have meaningful labels, so the
owner is just guessing that s/he has what's needed on them. It's not
unusual for us to get a bunch of 5.25" floppies that the owner swears was
created on his PC and find a few Apple diskettes in the lot. Most often,
the owner has no idea of what software was run that far back.
I wonder how well the results of this particular job are going to sit with
the owner, though--most of the stuff on the tape deals with communicating
with a VAX while running WFWG 3.11--i.e., there's no source code,
correspondence, spreadsheets, etc. that would seem to make this worthwhile.
Just commodity software.
Cheers,
Chuck