[TUHS] Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from `quotes'

Henry Bent henry.r.bent at gmail.com
Sat Nov 25 04:17:28 AEST 2017


On 24 November 2017 at 13:06, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe at math.utah.edu>
wrote:

> P.S. In 1990, we filled a dumpster with 9-track tapes that we had to
> abandon because of our move to new hardware that lacked such a drive,
> and because our new disk system had insufficent disk space to preserve
> their contents.
>
> I have since regretted that decision many times, because a lot of
> stuff was lost forever.
>
> The maximum capacity of 6250-bpi 9-track tapes was about 100MB to
> 170MB.  A thousand such tapes would have needed just 100GB to 170GB,
> an amount of space that I can now buy in Utah for about US$4 (based on
> a local store offering of $94 for a 4TB USB-3 attached disk about the
> size of a paperback thriller).
>

Sure, but how much would 170GB of storage have cost in 1990?  And what
would have been the cost to mirror it, or to back it up on to a more modern
tape format?  Was that data really worth tens of thousands of dollars?

-Henry
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