Originally posted by: lordjedi
It's not analoguos at all. If NASA really wanted what was on those tapes, they could get it. There are companies in existence today that can read all tapes of backup tapes, even dating back 20 or 30 years. If they really wanted to spend the money, they could contract it out to a company to have all the media cataloged and labeled properly. And besides all that, I'm sure they've got most of the information on servers spread throughout the agency. No one I know makes backups and then deletes the original data (except maybe LFL
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It's not analoguos at all. If NASA really wanted what was on those tapes, they could get it. There are companies in existence today that can read all tapes of backup tapes, even dating back 20 or 30 years. If they really wanted to spend the money, they could contract it out to a company to have all the media cataloged and labeled properly. And besides all that, I'm sure they've got most of the information on servers spread throughout the agency. No one I know makes backups and then deletes the original data (except maybe LFL
) Well no they couldn't actually. Australia also has archives of astronomy data that no known machine exists to read, and they are desperate to find a solution. My favourite are these huge flat magnetic sheets about 2 foot wide and and 3 foot long. They are being kept, but there is little hope that they will ever be able to be read again.
Whippersnappers may not realise how weird and primitive the early days of computing were. Companies developed and built their own storage solutions, there were really no standards to speak of at all. It wasn't unusual for a computer company to only make one or two of a particular device for a given application.
When that equipment was either destroyed, lost or ceased to function, if the data had not already been transferred then it became less likely with each passing year that it ever could. As the original companies that made the equipment ceased to exist and the people died off that created them, then it became impossible.
Go back 30 years and there is not too much of a problem, standards had come into being - go back 50 years and you are pretty much stuffed unless you were dealing with IBM. A lot of it is not even something people would recognise as storage media to look at.
Unlike consumer gear that was mass produced, the devices just literally no longer exist. For mass produced stuff you can usually find a player *somewhere*, it is easy enough to still find a betamax VCR, or an elcasette player, a VHD or ced player, a reel to reel VTR etc. simply because they made a lot of them. When a company only made two items which no longer exist and went out of business 50 years ago and all the techs are now dead - it gets a bit harder.