[144848] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: wet-behind-the-ears whippersnapper seeking advice on building a
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jamie Bowden)
Tue Sep 20 07:59:57 2011
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2011 07:57:43 -0400
In-Reply-To: <9606.1316492099@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
From: "Jamie Bowden" <jamie@photon.com>
To: <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu>, "Randy Bush" <randy@psg.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu [mailto:Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 12:15 AM
>=20
> On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 05:32:04 +0200, Randy Bush said:
>=20
> > you left out one connection via a chevy full of hollerith cards and
> the
> > second a canoe full of 7 track tape in waterproof containers.
>=20
> Does anybody actually *have* a functional 7 track drive? I remember
> seeing a
> story on PBS (may have been a Nova episode) where they discussed the
> fact that
> NASA had literally thousands of 7 track tapes of telemetry data and no
> way to
> read them because their last 7 track drive had died, and IBM had no 7
> track
> read/write heads left either...
>=20
> (I admit we still have a rack of 9-track tapes in ez-loader seals in
> our tape
> library, though we got rid of our last IBM 3420 about a decade ago. I
> think
> most of them are tapes we've lost track of ownership info, and don't
> dare
> dispose of in case the owner turns up.. ;)
It's worse than that. I spent a little time working at NASA LaRC, and
even if you had a functional drive, the tapes are mostly garbage (we had
tens of thousands of 9 track spools that had spent decades in rooms with
no temp or humidity controls). No point in trying to read data from a
tape that's shedding the layer of magnetic material. We were not
unique.
Jamie
