[TUHS] PL/I stuff - was: Book Recommendation

[Alan Glasser]

In my experience 9 track tapes were not guaranteed to be readable after some interval. In fact, a standard operations procedure was to copy important tapes to new media periodically. 

I distinctly remember a rather catastrophic error in the AT&T Worldnet ISP mail system. It was running a third party email server product on a large cluster of big Sun boxes. A new release was installed. It had bugs and curdled all of the customers’ data. It got backed out and a huge restore from backup effort began, only to find that a bunch of recently written tapes were unreadable.  Needless to say, we had unhappy customers and, if I remember correctly, some very negative press in the WSJ and the NY Times. 

 - Alan

> On Nov 24, 2021, at 9:06 PM, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
> 
> I have a relative who is an archivist, the sister-discipline to
> librarians (Mike Lesk was at heart I think, in the library most the
> time time. I say this, because I always think about Mike when the
> topic of data and libraries comes up. He was nice to me at UCL and I
> have a soft spot for anyone who was nice to me.)
> 
> Anyway, She tells me that the primary role of archivists is to help
> people throw things away.
> 
> As a (sometime) scientist in (mostly) data, I know I have serial
> hoarding disease. But I also know that NASA and other agencies only
> found some things, by going back into the stacks to re-read old tapes,
> without the "noise reduction filter" which had taken signal out.
> 
> So I feel your pain, loosing the tapes will have hurt. But I also know
> along the path in time, Somebody had a role to play, curating the data
> into the modern era. You're not alone, the BBC had this problem in
> spades, re-using Umatic tape to save money. Ephemeral content which
> turns out to be in some cases the probably only copy of what is data
> to us now, but was junk to them then.
> 
> -G