James B. Byrne wrote:
On Wed, March 14, 2012 00:26, Nataraj wrote:
I think the reality is that nothing lasts forever. Optical media is
probably much more
likely to survive ICBM's, but then you may not have a drive to read
them...
About five years ago I was asked to recover data from a 2400' reel mag-tape of unknown provenance in an unknown format. The possessor was a university professor and the tape dated from the late 1970s. It contained data from social science research projects he had conducted at that time.
*chortle*
a) the data was vastly obsolete b) should have been copied over c) had you asked me, and only telling me the above, I would have told you, with 95% (at least) confidence, that it was EBCDIC. <snip>
a CDC machine. However, the entire tape after the headers was blank. Not corrupt, not zeroed, just blank. Apparently the operator had mounted, initialized and labelled an evidently new tape but never actually put any data on it.
<snip> <chuckle>
I should talk to my friend, who's a history professor up in Canada. At least I think all his stuff is on CDs or DVDs.
mark