From: James Frew <frew@ucsb.edu>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: reading historic magnetic tapes
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2023 11:29:05 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1595e77d-697c-b2e8-5aff-fe63c92f4747@ucsb.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <6778F07B-DD74-4F04-A877-7D3751E96317@quintile.net>
My "favorite" magtape story:
In a former life I managed a university research lab whose main activity
was analyzing digital imagery from Earth satellites, back when said
imagery was distributed and locally archived on 9-track magtape. Most of
the OGs on this list will recall that the standard way of storing said
magtapes was on floor-to-ceiling racks that held the tapes by a hook on
the plastic ring (the "seal") around the edge of the tape.
The story begins with a bunch of read errors showing up on some of the
tapes. We quickly pinned it down to a specific sensor and range of
dates, which of course led to a back-and-forth with NASA that didn't
converge (other researchers were having no problems with identical data
on tapes from the same batch, etc.)
As I was leaving the lab late one evening during this mini-crisis, I had
to walk around a custodian who was busy giving the linoleum floor in the
hallway its annual deep cleaning / polishing. This involved a dingus
with a large (~18" diameter) horizontal buffing wheel, atop which sat an
enormous (like, a cylinder about as big around as a soccer ball)
electric motor, sparking commutator clearly visible through the vents in
the metal housing. I asked the custodian if he'd done the floors in our
lab recently. "Sure, they did them last week" (on the graveyard shift,
apparently, since nobody noticed.) Hmm. Back into the lab, and there
were the offending tapes, all occupying the bottom row of the tape rack,
right next to an extra-shiny linoleum floor. Indeed, the floor
*underneath* the tapes was mostly polished---the helpful custodian
apparently ran the motor right up against the hanging tapes, to get the
buffer as far under as possible...
Filed under "threats you never ever considered."
/Frew
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-01-28 19:30 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-01-28 10:12 [TUHS] " Steve Simon
2023-01-28 19:29 ` James Frew [this message]
2023-01-28 20:12 ` [TUHS] " Michael Kjörling
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