The precarious state of classic software and hardware preservation
Jon Elson
elson at pico-systems.com
Tue Nov 23 13:22:32 CST 2021
On 11/23/21 12:21 PM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> On 11/23/21 9:51 AM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
> doubt that a single line of that survives.
>> You would probably be wrong, it likely was archived before
>> it stopped being used. But that won't do you any good as
>> even if you could submit a FOIA request for it the cost of
>> recovering it would be prohibitive and they would not have
>> to honor it. :-)
> I don't think so--the project I had in mind was a military project that
> sunset some time in the late 1970s.
Yup, A guy I know was in the aerospace fabrication business
(now retired). A few years back, he showed us some horribly
degraded mylar plots of some military aircraft drawings that
were all the manufacturer could come up with. The Air Force
was doing a major rebuild of those airframes, and needed
some skins shaped to replace the tailplane airfoils. He
knew where possibly the only airfoil bender was, and quickly
bought it from a scrap dealer. They then had to scrutinize
the plots and try to extract the original dimensions so they
could bend the skin to the required shape. Lucky the
original manufacturer at least had some form of document
still available, or they would have had to do some 3D
scanning of an existing part that was not too far gone.
Jon
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