One area that we had a lot of debate on at P&H Mining was how to access tapes that were saved. They saved a lot of 3490 carts, but had no way of reading them. They thought of buying a 3490 drive and software to convert the data to ASCII, but as far as I know, they didn't buy anything. I think that would have cost about $10K.
They also sent a couple of tapes to different places to be converted to test out their services. They could convert the tape fairly reasonably, but what came back on a CD was useless, as none of the packed fields were readable. To convert data tapes, you need to supply the vendor with all of the record layouts, and they charge a couple thousand dollars for each different layout to set it up. I don't remember any of the companies that we looked at for this service. If you search google, you can find several companies that do that. Eric Bielefeld <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Bill, Search the latest archives for Eric Bielfield. If anyone has that list, he does. Bob Richards -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Pfeifer, William We have been preparing for this final transition but are not sure we have all our bases covered. Listed below are some items that we have consider so far: * Destroy all tape cartridges (3480s) as they may contain personal data like SSNs, names, addresses and birthdates. * Apply a product like FDRERASE to purge the dasd. * Contact software vendors to cancel contracts. * Dispose of the mainframe and peripheral devices. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
