This cannot be stressed enough to make today's data available, (AND READABLE) for the coming generations. This is continuing NEW news! PBS once had a (Frontline I think) piece on "Our Fading Past" in which the cameo presentation was on NOAA's 7 track tape data debacle. Nobody makes 7 track drives anymore and NOAA has had to resort to dredging (like we do) junkers from the boneyards, restoring them and getting them to read the old stored data. NOAA engineers devised a program to rewind the tape and reread the data if it found dropouts (of which there were many). The presentation showed rows of drives backing up and moving forward in the attempt at rescuing the "fading past". The back and forth movement of the drives trying to reread data was nicknamed "Maytagging" by NOAA engineers. THANK YOU Mr Jonas for reminding us of the importance. Bill Inderrieden Message: 2 Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2017 22:11:28 -0500 From: Jeffrey Jonas <jeffrey.scott.jonas@gmail.com> To: vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org Subject: [vcf-midatlantic] adjunct to bitsavers and Library of Congress? Message-ID: <CAOCNM4TAcwrYWO+ADceF6wt6w7yuFuOUZGT_QxNz9146ctOpzQ@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" old news to us but good to see it in the spotlight: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/15/back-up-back-up-back-up.html A deep dive into the race to preserve our digital heritage [copying up data from old media, using virtual machines to emulate the required legacy operating system, applications and such to access the data formats]