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