Since Sellam just talked to someone about this.. Here is the only useful bit of information in the discussion: --- I talked to the guy who used to run Pioneer... ...and the situation is as follows: * The data used to be stored on magnetic tape. When the tape started deteriorating, all the data was archived off onto then state-of-the-art MO disks. * The machine used was a MicroVAX with a DEC RWZ21 SCSI MO drive, which is apparently quite rare. The disks are 128MB each. * For Pioneer 10, there are 155 disks, making 19840 MB of data. * For Pioneer 11, there are 217 disks, making 27776 MB of data. * Each disk takes about 10 minutes to read to the MicroVAX, and then more time to move across onto a real computer, of course. I would have happily volunteered to spend a couple of days swapping disks in order to salvage all this lot, but alas, I'm the wrong side of the Atlantic. The guy in charge has recently been made redundant, and he was desperate to find someone to hand off all this to... but there's incredible beaurocracy. (I gather all the data was actually supposed to have been destroyed some years ago, but through some 'oversight' hadn't been.) Alas, I don't have permission to publish his address, but I'll put him in touch with the Planetary Society on the off chance he doesn't know about this. Interestingly, for years he ran the Pioneer spacecraft off a Mac Quadra 950! Check out the screen shots [nasa.gov]...