
Historic NASA Project Files and Software Appear in Amiga 2500 EBay Listing - mmastrac
https://hothardware.com/news/nasa-data-and-fallen-astronauts-software-appear-on-amiga-2500-ebay-listing
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rootbear
Something is seriously strange here. I work at NASA as a system administrator.
That system should not still have the asset tag attached. Those are removed
when an item goes through excess. Also, NO hard drives are to leave NASA with
any data on them. I wipe all hard drives before I excess a system and I think
the inventory people do it again. It's possible that this system was disposed
of before that rule went into effect but that seems unlikely. I was able to
zoom in on the photo on Ebay and get the asset tag number. That item is not in
the asset database any longer, so it seems to have been legitimately excessed,
and isn't stolen, but still, this is very odd.

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matheweis
I worked for a few years at a federal research facility that had some loaner
equipment from NASA/JPL tied to the mars rover projects.

It only takes one mistake by the intern asked to surplus the pile of old junk
on the shelf who doesn’t recognize it for what it is...

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userbinator
_the system was used in NASA 's telemetry labs and is decked out with a NASA
asset and inventory tags from 2005_

...2005, a time when "telemetry" hadn't yet gained its more sinister meaning
of "privacy invasion", P2P meant you could find just about anything on the
Internet, and computing freedom was pretty high. Of course, the Space Shuttle
program was still active too. But for me, and likely many others, the word
"telemetry" now has a negative connotation.

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engi_nerd
I made a living doing airborne telemetry and instrumentation for almost a
decade. Those words, in my professional context, meant that I was an engineer
who designed and operationally supported systems to gather data of all kinds
(avionics buses, physical transducer readings), record that data, and transmit
a crucial subset of that data to the ground for real-time monitoring by
engineers.

But "telemetry" and "instrumentation" have meanings in the tech world, and
it's sad that one of the meanings carried in the "telemetry" suitcase is
"privacy invasion".

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doener
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848354](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848354)

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dmead
this belongs in a museum no?

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Jaruzel
Depends. There's nothing special about the Amiga itself; there are many 2500s
out there.

I DO think however, that the contents of the hard-drive need archiving and
given over to archive.org - providing NASA are OK with that of course.

What scares me a little bit is that the seller has clearly performed some
'write' operations on the data - you can see him running LHA to extract an
archive. If he's done that then there is no telling what else he's done and
what may have been lost or contaminated in the process. :(

Looking at the price he's clearly just trying to cash in, and has no interest
in it's real historic value.

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jacobush
Cashing in can be tempting, I can get that. But he should stay off the damn
drive!

