On 07/07/2017 12:17 PM, Al Kossow via cctalk wrote: > I'm much less hopeful on any other parallel tape formats, since there > are so few and the desire to recover any of that has been low.
It brings up another aspect. I've done a batch of tapes that had nothing more that the originator's name and an inventory number. Upon recovering data, the customer had no idea what it meant or how it was created or even the system used to create it. We're coming onto the "Linear B" era in computing I think, where knowledge is passing out of human memory. I noted that some years ago with the mention of the Zodiac system. Something like $200M initially spent on it, when that was a lot of money. Few documents remain and no (AFAIK) data samples. I've heard estimates of 3M lines of code, all of it gone. I'll wager that there are hundreds of cases of this kind of thing. --Chuck
