Many of us, who were hoarding old tapes, not knowing what would be done with them, of course never anticipated that you can run MVS on a PC. (And you LEGALLY can run 1975-vintage MVS 3.8 at home.)So even if you think your old tapes aren't useful, you can make them useful to SOMEBODY, and the other side is, that CDs and DVDs take up a whole lot less space than tapes do. And also, you can make duplicates of CDs and DVDs much more easily, so they can be saved for longer.
By all means, ancient software from the mainframe world should be saved. Relatively little from before 1980 still exists from IBM, and extremely little from most other mainframe companies. If you find an old tape disk, or even stack of cards, please look into giving or lending them to an archivist to save the bits, such as the CBT folks or CHM. I suppose I will toot Computer History Museum's horn again - sorry about that, I am trying not to steal CBT's thunder - but they are doing a great job of saving what is out there from IBM and the BUNCH. The museum is not just hardware and manuals - there is a full time software curator on staff, and he can handle many interesting problems with old, and often failing, media. Yes, there are probably some legality issues for some of it, but as far as I know IBM has never bothered CHM about it. This is probably a question best answered by the CHM staff. And as the software gets older, the problem tends to go away.The important thing is that the bits are saved. -- Will ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
