
Scrap dealer finds Apollo-era NASA computers in dead engineer’s basement - pinewurst
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/nasa-computer-engineer-basement/
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HugoDaniel
_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 ?

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jcrawfordor
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.

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

~~~
jcrawfordor
Possibly - but COBOL was actually very new when some of these tapes were made
according to the date range in the article, so there's a high chance (I'd bet
on it) that the tapes are not in COBOL record format. BCD was implemented in
the machine language in the IBM machines and so it was widely used prior to
COBOL, the CDC machine involved here does not have BCD in its instructions but
still provided some support for BCD operations because like many smaller
computers of the era these CDCs were often used to pre/postprocess tapes also
used with larger IBM machines - in an analogy to more modern architecture, it
was not uncommon at the time to 'map' on an IBM mainframe (collect data from
other sources, often) and then take the tapes to smaller machines to 'reduce'
(totalize, etc). This allowed for using time on the very expensive IBM
machines more efficiently.

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ourmandave
So you've already worked out all the tricky parts and done the calculations on
the back of a napkin.

The only remaining question is, when can you start?

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

~~~
neuromantik8086
The aliens told them to.

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52-6F-62
Surely they could donate the tapes to a historical foundation or society who
would relish the opportunity to attempt restoration?

~~~
gridscomputing
and relish inhaling black mold

