> From: valdis.kletni...@vt.edu [mailto:valdis.kletni...@vt.edu] > Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 12:15 AM > > On Tue, 20 Sep 2011 05:32:04 +0200, Randy Bush said: > > > 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. > > 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... > > (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