7 Nov
2008
7 Nov
'08
5:40 p.m.
Look at what Al Kossow has managed to do with
bitsavers. Yup, a lot of
"collectible" documents have undergone spine-ectomies, but had he simply
rented a warehouse and shelved everything, I'd guess that none of us
would have heard, much less benefited from, bitsavers.
In the real world "good enough" trumps
"ideally."
Exactly. You can collect paper of marginal historical
value faster and with greater volume than you can afford to store it.
There is absolutely no way that I can afford to keep the paper that I
currently have, and have been working on triage and recycling for several
years now. Bitsavers is just under 100gb right now. That is a LOT of linear
feet of paper!
I've been scanning hundreds of magazine dups at CHM for the past two months
just to OCR and index the text for research on the exhibit we are building.
I'm not concerned about the images of the ads (including the WPS ones). We
approached other institutions, and they were not interested in the paper.
The spines were cut, and have been scanned using a high speed sheet feeder.
They are worth more to researchers as indexed bits than as pallets of dead
trees.
Newsprint is an even worse problem.
10 Nov
10 Nov
4:18 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
I presume that this implies NASA had tried and failed to find such a
drive via IBM?
Good to see that some old tapes retain their data!
Antonio
4:31 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
2008/11/10 Antonio Carlini <arcarlini at iee.org>:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
I presume that this implies NASA had tried and failed to find such a
drive via IBM?
Good to see that some old tapes retain their data!
Antonio
:?) I was about to post that link, too.
I suspect that the museum might welcome contacts from anyone with
experience of restoring such elderly kit - it sounds from the news
story that they are rather daunted by the task!
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
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9:01 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
2008/11/10 Antonio Carlini <arcarlini at iee.org>:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
Golly, why use an IBM pinch-roller drive (I remember the 729-IV on
S/360 gear) when a CDC vacuum-capstan drive would be far gentler on
the tape? A modern streamer might be gentler still.
Just curious about the selection of the drive.
Cheers,
Chuck
9:33 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Chuck Guzis wrote:
2008/11/10 Antonio Carlini <arcarlini at
iee.org>:
My guess, the program was written in FORTRAN just for that
drive.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
Golly, why use an IBM pinch-roller drive (I remember the 729-IV on
S/360 gear) when a CDC vacuum-capstan drive would be far gentler on
the tape? A modern streamer might be gentler still.
Just curious about the selection of the drive.
Cheers,
Chuck
9:45 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
But it's just a plain old 1/2 inch tape drive. And Fortran wouldn't care about
the specific model... In fact, if it's Fortran it could be easily ported to GCC
Fortran and run with any convenient 1/2 inch SCSI tape drive on a PC...
paul
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf
Of bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca
Sent: Monday, November 10, 2008 12:34 PM
To: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: Old tape drive proves its worth
Chuck Guzis wrote:
2008/11/10 Antonio Carlini <arcarlini at
iee.org>:
My guess, the program was written in FORTRAN just for that
drive.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
Golly, why use an IBM pinch-roller drive (I remember the 729-IV on
S/360 gear) when a CDC vacuum-capstan drive would be far gentler on
the tape? A modern streamer might be gentler still.
Just curious about the selection of the drive.
Cheers,
Chuck
10:16 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
But it's just a plain old 1/2 inch tape drive.
And Fortran wouldn't care about the specific model... In fact, if it's Fortran it
could be easily ported to GCC Fortran and run with any convenient 1/2 inch SCSI tape drive
on a PC...
My guess, the program was written in FORTRAN just for that
drive.
And the source is missing of course ...
Also in theory you could examine a moon rock too, but look at all
the red tape...
9:41 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Golly, why use an IBM pinch-roller drive (I remember
the 729-IV on
S/360 gear) when a CDC vacuum-capstan drive would be far gentler on
the tape? A modern streamer might be gentler still.
Just curious about the selection of the drive.
Best yet, they could just ask NASA for the data. EVERY BIT OF EVERY
MISSION is archived and (mostly) available online. Some of the more
obscure data still needs to be pulled of WORMs. Mike at RCS/RI says
DEC WORM drives.
I wish people would just bury this damn "lost NASA data" crap in the
lunar dust...
--
Will
9:59 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
On 10 Nov 2008 at 12:41, William Donzelli wrote:
Best yet, they could just ask NASA for the data. EVERY
BIT OF EVERY
MISSION is archived and (mostly) available online. Some of the more
obscure data still needs to be pulled of WORMs. Mike at RCS/RI says
DEC WORM drives.
That's what I thought. I can't imagine that NASA would consign
mission data to the dumpster, particularly given the (comparatively)
small number of missions.
Cheers,
Chuck
1:10 p.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Minor correction - most is not online, but it all can be ordered and a
tape or CDROM written.
That's what I thought. I can't imagine that
NASA would consign
mission data to the dumpster, particularly given the (comparatively)
small number of missions.
I think this is all blown up from a few researchers over the years
that have been looking for the original telemetry tapes. At least one
group recently has been looking into something with anomalies in
signal transit time or something, and the raw telemetry data could be
distilled to get some real data. NASA, however, did not keep many of
the telemetry tapes - but they never intended to keep them. As soon as
able, the tapes were read and decoded into the data they wanted from
the probes and eventually made public to the zillions of scientists
that were foaming at the mouth for it. Keeping the telemetry tapes
would be similar to Jay archiving this list with all the TCP/IP
headers and junk.
I think RCS/RI has one of the original Viking mission tapes kicking around.
--
Will
1:36 p.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
That's what I thought. I can't imagine that
NASA would consign
mission data to the dumpster, particularly given the (comparatively)
small number of missions.
40 years ago, when I was working at the National Space Sciences Data
Center (building 26, Goddard Space Flight Center), tapes, decks of cards,
and Fortran source were going missing on a regular basis, and some of the
people managing the tape collections felt that only the most recent data
was worth keeping. On a few occasions, I was handed "scratch" tapes to
use for output and transfer to plotters that had important sounding prior
labels on them. "I'm sure that there must be a few more copies of that
data around somewhere."
1:51 p.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
40 years ago, when I was working at the National Space
Sciences Data
Center (building 26, Goddard Space Flight Center), tapes, decks of cards,
and Fortran source were going missing on a regular basis, and some of the
people managing the tape collections felt that only the most recent data
was worth keeping. On a few occasions, I was handed "scratch" tapes to
use for output and transfer to plotters that had important sounding prior
labels on them. "I'm sure that there must be a few more copies of that
data around somewhere."
Well, apparently there was.
--
Will
2:09 p.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
On 10 Nov 2008 at 16:10, William Donzelli wrote:
I think this is all blown up from a few researchers
over the years
that have been looking for the original telemetry tapes. At least one
group recently has been looking into something with anomalies in
signal transit time or something, and the raw telemetry data could be
distilled to get some real data. NASA, however, did not keep many of
the telemetry tapes - but they never intended to keep them. As soon as
able, the tapes were read and decoded into the data they wanted from
the probes and eventually made public to the zillions of scientists
that were foaming at the mouth for it. Keeping the telemetry tapes
would be similar to Jay archiving this list with all the TCP/IP
headers and junk.
I remember chatting with a guy in the next office over who was on the
MDSF project (remember Skylab?). He quoted some fairly astonishing
numbers to me on the amount of the raw telemetry data that was
actually discarded in processing.
Was any of the software from MDSF ever archived?
Cheers,
Chuck
1:34 p.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
"Chuck Guzis" wrote:
2008/11/10 Antonio Carlini <arcarlini at
iee.org>:
Yea, that made no sense to me either. NASA has found better
ways to read old tapes. I assumed someone would suggest
a better method to them...
-brad
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
Golly, why use an IBM pinch-roller drive (I remember the 729-IV on
S/360 gear) when a CDC vacuum-capstan drive would be far gentler on
the tape? A modern streamer might be gentler still.
Just curious about the selection of the drive. 
4:36 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
On Mon, 10 Nov 2008, Antonio Carlini wrote:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
I presume that this implies NASA had tried and failed to find such a
drive via IBM?
Good to see that some old tapes retain their data!
Why do they call it a "tape recorder". To me, that implies a device for
recording audio or video.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
4:51 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
2008/11/10 David Griffith <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu>:
On Mon, 10 Nov 2008, Antonio Carlini wrote:
I've worked with many qualified IT professionals who have never seen
any version of Windows older than XP (released 2001) and no other
general-purpose computer OS of any kind ever other than Windows. In my
first full-time job as an IT journalist, in 1995-1996, I met many
people who had no experience of any version of Windows before Windows
95 - when that product was less than a year old.
Memories in IT are short.
Tape drives (let alone tape /streamers/) are an archaic, historical
curiosity now. You have to be a veteran of the IT industry - that is,
around for a decade or more - to remember primitive tech like DAT
drives. Most such people are now so senior they never handle kit any
more.
Tapes are history.
The slight snag being that there's nothing to replace them with. Now,
a common solution is a virtualised tape library - a rack of disks in a
RAID pretending to be a tape drive with lots of cartridges already
loaded. This probably talks to the server being backed up using iSCSI
- SCSI packets encapsulated in TCP/IP and then sent to the storage
server over Ethernet. Layer upon layer upon layer of emulation.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
I presume that this implies NASA had tried and failed to find such a
drive via IBM?
Good to see that some old tapes retain their data!
Why do they call it a "tape recorder". To me, that implies a device for
recording audio or video. 
5:13 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Liam Proven wrote:
I've worked with many qualified IT professionals
who have never seen
any version of Windows older than XP (released 2001) and no other
general-purpose computer OS of any kind ever other than Windows. In my
first full-time job as an IT journalist, in 1995-1996, I met many
people who had no experience of any version of Windows before Windows
95 - when that product was less than a year old.
I still run into quite a few people who don't know that there are
operating systems besides Windows and OS X. Some have a vague concept
of "those old computers" that ran "something else".
Tapes are history.
Not hardly. They've finally got stiff competition in off-site
spinning copies and second- and third-tier disk arrays, but they're a
long, long way from going away as production hardware.
Doc
7:17 p.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Doc Shipley wrote:
IBM Poughkeepsie has a truly gigantic (thousands and thousands of square
feet) customer tape pool. Tapes are very much still in use.
Peace... Sridhar
Tapes are
history.
Not hardly. They've finally got stiff competition in off-site
spinning copies and second- and third-tier disk arrays, but they're a
long, long way from going away as production hardware. 
11 Nov
11 Nov
12:31 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Tapes are history.
Not hardly. They've
finally got stiff competition in off-site
spinning copies and second- and third-tier disk arrays, but they're a
long, long way from going away as production hardware.
10 Nov
10 Nov
6:28 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Liam Proven wrote:
Tapes are history.
It would seem not. We have at least one tape library in the office.
It's about the size of a half-height (UK) fridge. Maybe a little deeper.
We use it for testing and we do that because we have customers who need
that functionality. OK, it's an expensive bit of kit and it sits on
Fiber Channel
(so by definition that first statement is true:-)). You probably won't
see
one in a small office. But there must be people with datacentres full
of them (or, more likely their bigger, taller cousins).
Antonio
7:32 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
At 2:28 PM +0000 11/10/08, Antonio Carlini wrote:
Liam Proven wrote:
<raises hand>
We have rows of tape libraries in our datacenter and go through
thousands of tapes each week. There are plenty of reasons tapes are
still around, and they won't be gone anytime in the foreseeable
future. At the same time new technologies are replacing some uses
for tapes.
Zane
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. |
| http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |
Tapes are history.
It would seem not. We have at least one tape library in the office.
It's about the size of a half-height (UK) fridge. Maybe a little deeper.
We use it for testing and we do that because we have customers who need
that functionality. OK, it's an expensive bit of kit and it sits on
Fiber Channel
(so by definition that first statement is true:-)). You probably won't
see
one in a small office. But there must be people with datacentres full
of them (or, more likely their bigger, taller cousins). 
7:37 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
On 10/11/2008 14:28, Antonio Carlini wrote:
Liam Proven wrote:
[ ...
]
Tapes are history.
It would seem not. We have at least one tape library in the office.
It's about the size of a half-height (UK) fridge. Maybe a little deeper. But there must be people with datacentres full
of them (or, more likely their bigger, taller cousins).
We have a bigger taller cousin, two very large conjoined cabinets with a
scary robot arm, a few drives, and a shedload[1] of LTO4s. If you want
to see what the previous generation looked like, see the cover and page
10 of http://www.york.ac.uk/services/cserv/offdocs/keynotes/oct01.pdf
This is the backup for our mirrored pair of filers.
[1] This is accurate. The cabinets actually take up more space than my
wife's garden shed.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
7:16 p.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Liam Proven wrote:
2008/11/10 David Griffith <dgriffi at
cs.csubak.edu>:
Someone who tries to call themselves an "IT professional" who has never
seen a general-purpose computer OS other than Windows is not someone I
would call "qualified". And I can guarantee they wouldn't get hired
here where I work, even for a Windows job.
Peace... Sridhar
On Mon, 10 Nov 2008, Antonio Carlini wrote:
I've worked with many qualified IT professionals who have never seen
any version of Windows older than XP (released 2001) and no other
general-purpose computer OS of any kind ever other than Windows. In my
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
I presume that this implies NASA had tried and failed to find such a
drive via IBM?
Good to see that some old tapes retain their data!
Why do they call it a
"tape recorder". To me, that implies a device for
recording audio or video. 
4:44 a.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
*blink*
On 10/11/2008, Antonio Carlini <arcarlini at iee.org> wrote:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
I presume that this implies NASA had tried and failed to find such a
drive via IBM?
Good to see that some old tapes retain their data!
After reading the article, I get the impression that it is at the
stage of, we have some tapes that were recorded with data that have
been kept in controlled conditions for 2 out of the last 35 years, and
we have located a drive designed to read the tapes. If there is still
data on the tape, and it can be read by the drive - that is something
we will find out in mid Jan!
Simon
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Well, an engineer is not concerned with the truth; that is left to
philosophers and theologians: the prime concern of an engineer is
the utility of the final product."
Lectures on the Electrical Properties of Materials, L.Solymar, D.Walsh
7:13 p.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Antonio Carlini wrote:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
I presume that this implies NASA had tried and failed to find such a
drive via IBM?
I doubt it. If you throw enough money at them, they'll *build you a new
one*.
Peace... Sridhar
11 Nov
11 Nov
3:22 p.m.
New subject: Old tape drive proves its worth
Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
Antonio Carlini wrote:
Why don't they just send the tapes to CHM? They have a wall of 729 tape
drives:
http://ed-thelen.org/1401Project/1401-CHM-Right-Labeled-.jpg
And some of them are even working already, it seems, as part of the 1401
restore efforts:
http://ed-thelen.org/1401Project/1401RestorationPage.html
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm
An IBM729 Mark 5 tape drive grabbed the data for NASA.
I presume that this implies NASA had tried and failed to find such a
drive via IBM?
I doubt it. If you throw enough money at them, they'll *build you a
new one*.
Peace... Sridhar
5885
days inactive
5888
days old
25 comments
17 participants
participants (17)
-
aek＠bitsavers.org -
ak6dn＠mindspring.com -
alexandre-listas＠e-secure.com.br -
arcarlini＠iee.org -
bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
brad＠heeltoe.com -
cclist＠sydex.com -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
dgriffi＠cs.csubak.edu -
doc＠mdrconsult.com -
fryers＠gmail.com -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
lproven＠gmail.com -
Paul_Koning＠Dell.com -
pete＠dunnington.plus.com -
ploopster＠gmail.com -
wdonzelli＠gmail.com