From: "Nico de Jong" <nico at FARUMDATA.DK> Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 1:28 PM The problem is if the data format is not documented. Adobe understood that when they developed PostScript and PDF's, both are well documented. If you have data with an unknown format then you can speend years trying to understand it, Egyptian hieroglyphs were made readable by using the Rosetta stone. Adobe's documentation of both the PostScript and PDF formats are the rosetta stones for their respective formats. The information written in hieroglyphics as been translated to current languages including english. The original hieroglyphs are kept, I expect PDF's to be treated similarly. In the future as newer formats are created I expect automated proceedures will exist to translate PDF's to newer formats maybe akin to the babel project. Some have recommended use PostScript as a document archival medium. Adobe knows the limitations of PostScript better than anyone else and they decided that is is not the right format. They created the PDF format for the exact task at hand. I would never post a document as a series of individual pages. PDF is the structure that defines what the document is. I expect that in the future many better systems will not only be developed but will have wide spread acceptance. Right now only PDF's have universal acceptance. Randy www.s100-manuals.com

On Thu, 9 Jun 2005, Nico de Jong wrote: I agree enthusiatically with Nico. Although it MIGHT be difficult or "impossible" to "decode" the data, once the "indecipherable" data has been transferred to current media, then the whole issue of "obsolete, unobtainable hardware" becomes moot. There are a LOT of statements made about "can't get an old computer in order to be able to read it" being made by people who are not making ANY effort to TRY, or even to contact museums/collectors who HAVE those old machines. "There aren't any conputers that can read punch cards anymore", etc. I'm becoming convinced that the "unavailability of old computer" is code for: "the guy who understands this stuff doesn't work here anymore, and we don't WANT to have responsibility for the old data." -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Koning" <pkoning at equallogic.com> To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, June 10, 2005 3:43 PM Subject: Re: Data formats was Re: Rescue of data from Pioneer 10 & 11 tapes atJPL needed.Vintagecomputers slated for demolition. The question you pose is probably not relevant. My (mainframe) background is in commercial routines (invoicing, personel, stock, wages, ....) so if I had to rephrase the question, it would be something like "Is there (1) a Cobol (PL/I, RPG, ....) compiler available which is compatible with the source files I have on tape, and (2) does the compiler handle data structures (e.g. COMP-3) in the same way as the original compiler". If so, I wouldnt give a toss about hardware implementations. Binaries alone are probably not enough; you would have unmodifyable programs, which would/could raise problems like Y2K. Were the source available, you could solve the problem, even for old data carriers Nico

Paul Koning wrote: Or, if you want to be picky with it, most computers not Y2K-compliant will accept either 1988 or 1994. That gives you the correct day-of-week. Doc

Paul Koning wrote: Doc Shipley wrote: Fred wrote: set the system clock to 1977, you'll have the correct day of the week and leap years for another 22 years, after which you can set it back to 1977 again. Some machines, though, are too "smart" to let you set the year to 1977, but yet not smart enough to handle Y2K correctly. Eric

Paul Koning wrote: In which sense is BLISS not in current use? I know most _new_ stuff that OpenVMS Engineering do is now in C, but there must be plenty of maintenance etc. happening in BLISS! I'm sure I still have an Algol compilr for OpenVMS somewhere. While Algol has probably fallen out of use, I expect that there are still plenty of people who would crawl out of the woodwork to help! I'll leave Jovial for someone else to defend :-) Antonio -- --------------- Antonio Carlini arcarlini at iee.org

From: "Paul Koning" <pkoning at equallogic.com> Sent: Friday, June 10, 2005 12:50 PM As for any problems with particular language dialects it has already been pointed out: There is the option of supporting the original hardware via emulation (faster than the original hardware to boot). The original software would have been likely written in Fortran which like any other language written on a particular environment will take some editing to get going but very doable. Randy www.s100-manuals.com

On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Nico de Jong wrote: Even more moot. Most of the work that we were doing at NASA was in FORTRAN. A FORTRAN compiler that runs on current machines is NOT necessary. If the source code is available, then it can be used, NOT for compiling, but for determining the structure of the data. If the source code is NOT available, then the structure of the data must be manually determined. After that, new software can be written to work with it. A REAL programmer can write a FORTRAN program in any language.

I was at RCS this afternoon, and after talking to Mike about the whole Pioneer 10 and 11 tape nonsense, we did a little digging: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=1972-012A&ds=* http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/MasterCatalog?sc=1973-019A&ds=* Well, well, well...it looks like every bit of Pioneer 10 and 11 has been saved already, and can be accessed thru the proper channels (on tape, but apparently they will burn a CDROM on request). Every other spacecraft, as well. It is time to lay this urban legend about rotting NASA tapes to rest. William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org

The whole article stinks a bit of "gimme gimme gimme". The bit about needing to rescue a hundred or so tapes is also suspect. A hundred nine track tapes would contain more data than all the Pioneers, and all other probes, sent - by a couple orders of magnitude. William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org

Max data rate for the link is only 2048 bits per second, and that's only when all the antenna-pointing for such a high rate is available (those antennas have other things to cover in general...) At 2048 bits per second, you get 8 GBytes/year. But most of the instruments you'd use when not doing a planetary flyby are happily served by a data rate of a few bits per second (which is how it spent most of its active life). Here in 2005, though, it's likely that the most interesting instruments are those that had low data rates. Not that the pictures weren't pretty, but all the folks I worked with (space plasma physicists) were far more interested in the not-pictures :-). I'm not sure how 100 tapes got turned into 8 Gbytes, but it's likely that data from a probe that spans decades have their data spread among a lot of original tapes. Tim.

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005, Randy McLaughlin wrote: In addition, there are "secondary" tapes. For example, I spent some time at NSSDC in GSFC assisting a British pysicist studying the Van Allenbelts. We would do a LOT of graphing of things, all written to tapes for plotting on Calcomp 570s and SD4060?s. A lot of those kind of "derived data" tapes will still be around. Unavailability of "obsolete computers" to "be able to read the tapes" is not, and never was, the actual problem. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Hercules! William Donzelli aw288 at osfn.org

jim> I have met these people and visit with them every year at the jim> JPL open house, and this is most certainly not the case. The jim> data division is very serious about conserving the data, and jim> they would do anything they can to convert it. So does that mean the Planetary Society article that started this whole thread was just a fund raising scam? paul

On 10 Jun, 2005, at 03:08, Fred Cisin wrote: For really odd computers, I can understand that there may be problems, but I would think that users in most cases got their data and applications ported to the next generation. Even if the tools used were not fully automatic, there is still a big area which would be nice to get mapped. One case is of course trivial. IBM are still selling computers which run the software for the first S/360, and the S/360 had porting tools for lots of other old systems, including simulators and emulators. HP-3000 also had a really long line of binary compatibility, but not as much in the way of porting tools. -- -bv