From: Alan Glasser <alanglasser@gmail.com>
To: George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org>
Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] PL/I stuff - was: Book Recommendation
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2021 17:33:01 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <0ABB7ECD-049B-4993-938F-82BC924E0F39@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAKr6gn274v1cYZV=R3kStLaTq8L5ipFGT5hmgDaEvfs_o3pwtQ@mail.gmail.com>
In my experience 9 track tapes were not guaranteed to be readable after some interval. In fact, a standard operations procedure was to copy important tapes to new media periodically.
I distinctly remember a rather catastrophic error in the AT&T Worldnet ISP mail system. It was running a third party email server product on a large cluster of big Sun boxes. A new release was installed. It had bugs and curdled all of the customers’ data. It got backed out and a huge restore from backup effort began, only to find that a bunch of recently written tapes were unreadable. Needless to say, we had unhappy customers and, if I remember correctly, some very negative press in the WSJ and the NY Times.
- Alan
> On Nov 24, 2021, at 9:06 PM, George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org> wrote:
>
> I have a relative who is an archivist, the sister-discipline to
> librarians (Mike Lesk was at heart I think, in the library most the
> time time. I say this, because I always think about Mike when the
> topic of data and libraries comes up. He was nice to me at UCL and I
> have a soft spot for anyone who was nice to me.)
>
> Anyway, She tells me that the primary role of archivists is to help
> people throw things away.
>
> As a (sometime) scientist in (mostly) data, I know I have serial
> hoarding disease. But I also know that NASA and other agencies only
> found some things, by going back into the stacks to re-read old tapes,
> without the "noise reduction filter" which had taken signal out.
>
> So I feel your pain, loosing the tapes will have hurt. But I also know
> along the path in time, Somebody had a role to play, curating the data
> into the modern era. You're not alone, the BBC had this problem in
> spades, re-using Umatic tape to save money. Ephemeral content which
> turns out to be in some cases the probably only copy of what is data
> to us now, but was junk to them then.
>
> -G
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-11-26 22:34 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 53+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-11-16 14:57 [TUHS] " Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16 15:22 ` Richard Salz
2021-11-16 15:52 ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-23 2:28 ` Mary Ann Horton
2021-11-23 7:57 ` Henry Bent
2021-11-23 8:10 ` arnold
2021-11-23 8:28 ` Henry Bent
2021-11-23 17:26 ` Adam Thornton
2021-11-23 18:54 ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-23 19:04 ` Al Kossow
2021-11-23 19:39 ` Lawrence Stewart
2021-11-23 19:08 ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-23 21:54 ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-11-24 15:18 ` Richard Salz
2021-11-24 15:45 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-24 18:34 ` Rich Morin
2021-11-24 18:40 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-24 19:39 ` Clem Cole
2021-11-24 20:02 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-26 19:49 ` [TUHS] AIX/SMIT (was Book Recommendation) Greg A. Woods
2021-11-25 10:26 ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2021-11-25 12:20 ` [TUHS] AIX/SMIT (was Re: Book Recommendation) Stuart Remphrey
2021-11-24 20:13 ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation arnold
2021-11-24 20:18 ` Will Senn
2021-11-25 7:22 ` arnold
2021-11-24 20:15 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-24 20:21 ` joe mcguckin
2021-11-24 20:27 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-24 21:27 ` Richard Salz
2021-11-24 22:19 ` Charles Anthony
2021-11-24 22:29 ` [TUHS] PL/I stuff - was: " Will Senn
2021-11-24 23:00 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-24 23:13 ` Richard Salz
2021-11-25 1:48 ` Nelson H. F. Beebe
2021-11-25 2:03 ` George Michaelson
2021-11-25 14:47 ` Clem Cole
2021-11-26 22:20 ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-26 22:33 ` Alan Glasser [this message]
2021-11-27 0:23 ` Dennis Boone
2021-11-27 0:30 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-27 0:47 ` Charles H. Sauer
2021-11-27 2:43 ` Alan Glasser
2021-11-27 0:56 ` Warner Losh
2021-11-24 23:54 Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-25 16:35 ` Paul Winalski
2021-11-25 18:15 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-11-26 16:59 ` Paul Winalski
2021-11-26 20:30 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2021-11-26 21:22 ` John Cowan
2021-11-27 0:01 ` George Michaelson
2021-11-27 16:12 ` Paul Winalski
2021-11-27 15:25 Noel Chiappa
2021-11-27 15:53 ` Charles H Sauer
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