source for cheap TK50s?

14 Jun 2000

...
    Yes.  VERY IMPORTANT!  Yet almost noone bothers to do
it.  NASA has tons
 (literally) of data that is decaying into worthlessness, because they
 didn't have viable plans for long-term retention. 
 Is this really true or just another legend? I ask because many people
 also say that the old data the Census Bereau keeps in digital form is also
 decaying and partially unreadable.

The NASA one is definitely true.  I was at a NASA workshop
sometime around 1990 where this was discussed.  One of the
problems we discussed was actually using the data before it
became unreadable.  At that point it was estimated that only
5% of the data collected by NASA was ever read.  There were
several reasons stated for this:

1) NASA is very conservative in data collection, they always
   collected more data than they need.  The main reason for
   this is the cost of sending out a probe, you don't want
   to miss something important and have send another one. 
This is a foggy memory from the a trip to Houston, but isn't a lot of older
data just printed text on paper?

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source for cheap TK50s?