Scrap dealer finds Apollo-era NASA computers in dead engineer’s basement

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/nasa-computer-engineer-basement/

by pinewurst • 9 years ago

54 19 9 years ago

HugoDaniel• 9 years ago

The archivist’s final recommendation: Destroy the tapes. “There is no evidence that suggests this material is historically significant... I recommend disposal through the immediate destruction of all magnetic tapes.”

Why ? Lack of evidence does not prove that it is historically insignificant. Also being historically insignificant does not imply it has no value.

Why not convert them to a digital format and put them on the internet and let the hackers/artists/archivists/space travelers/etc decide ?

bvod• 9 years ago

Since the tapes were damaged by "moderate to severe mould," it likely would have taken a non insignificant amount of work to convert them to digital format. NASA doesn't want to waste it's engineers' time - this seems more like work for a historical society or organization

bleair• 9 years ago

Think about how much budget and time and resource and nasa-career-path risk it would take for a manager at Nasa to ask for taking on a restoration project like this. Not going to happen.

jcrawfordor2• 9 years ago

For media of this age and in poor condition, conversion to digital format is an expensive and time consuming process - they would most likely need to hire a specialty company at a rather high rate.

In the best case, the tapes would be cleaned (very time consuming) and then read on a 'newer' 7-track tape drive (although not many of these have been manufactured for decades, the 9-track format having taken over in the '60s). A more likely case is that the tapes will also require some splicing to remove irrecoverably damaged sections that cause the drives to track poorly, and probably all transfer to new reels in the process of hand-cleaning. Then the data format on them is probably unknown. It's possible, although far from guaranteed, that there will be a COBOL-type format header, but even that can be very difficult to work from. This is particularly difficult since when you miss words due to tape damage it may not be clear how many words you missed (if the drive can't track at all), and the drive may not be helpful in exposing that this happened either.

At the end of this whole process, it's likely that the tapes contain the output of a test regime or model that isn't even parsable without the original software, which could possibly be on one of the tapes but given the era and machine (probably a CDC160 based on the CDC163 pictured) is just as likely to have been on punched paper tape which would definitely not have survived this many years. We're talking a series of unitless numbers, probably from a matrix of unknown dimensions (but possibly just a series!). It would be pure speculation what they even mean.

If the data is in BCD format (possible for this machine, particularly if any non-integer values were to be stored), then it is likely in fixed-width fields and it will not even be apparent where one number begins and another ends (depending on the data, this may be inferred by padding, but the location of the decimal point would remain hard to determine).

In historical preservation, you have to choose your battles.

Cthulhu_• 9 years ago

I'd even argue there's no specialty company that would be like "yeah we have a process for that" - a process to restore and recover the data would have to be invented on the spot. Which would be possible, but there's not a big chance of success. Cost... that just depends on whether there's a hobbyist going "I can do it" or a company going "Give us $x monies and we'll try it".

ourmandave2• 9 years ago

BCD you say? Somewhere there's a COBOL programmer (who saved the world back in 1999) tanned, rested, and ready to restore this tape!

mncharity2• 9 years ago

And at least for some old tapes, copying them is a read-once process. You can use an old drive that has been modified to not backtrack and retry on error. It doesn't help, and makes everything else worse. You run the tape straight through, non-stop, and get three things: some bits of data (if you're lucky), a rewound plastic backing, and a small pile of iron-rich dust.

mncharity2• 9 years ago

In historical preservation, you have to choose your battles.

Though you sometimes get fun surprises. An old Lisp Machine (hmm, or ITS PDP-10?) backup tape contained an unintentional screen dump. Freezing a moment in time. Editor session in progress. And an animated bug hack crawling across the screen. An virtual insect preserved in magnetic amber.

stillhere• 9 years ago

Because DOOM is real.

codewritinfool• 9 years ago

Why would they destroy the tapes? Seems foolish to me.

neuromantik8086• 9 years ago

The aliens told them to.

52-6F-62• 9 years ago

Surely they could donate the tapes to a historical foundation or society who would relish the opportunity to attempt restoration?

gridscomputing• 9 years ago

and relish inhaling black mold

Scrap dealer finds Apollo-era NASA computers in dead engineer’s basement

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