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Again, you're assuming that ordinary people had some way to easily "keep a copy for themselves". This was emphatically not the case. This data was not digital. It only existed as a set of magnetic tapes in an unusual format: 1" magnetic tapes containing application-specific analog data. The number of institutions that would have been capable of copying and storing this data would have been small; it's improbable that any individual, "happy mutant" or otherwise, could have done so at the time.

The notion that any sort of data is easy to copy and store is a modern concept. It was usually not the case in the past.



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