Gavin Scott wrote:

> This is a classic recurring problem throughout the history of computing,
> especially in business data processing where electronic records must often
> be kept for seven years or more (up to something like 20 years in some
> heavily regulated businesses I understand).  It's not hard to keep the
> media around, but keeping a working tape drive along with a computer that
> supports it is quite often nearly impossible or at least outrageously
> expensive.

Having the worlds largest collection of historically significant
computing equipment and ephemera The Computer Museum History Center
(http://www.computerhistory.org) is facing with this problem today. For
example, in the last two weeks we received all binary and source
documentation for the Multics operating system (Dockmaster mainframe
arrives next week). In addition the collection contains a large amount
of material stored on obsolete media such as 7-track magnetic tape,
paper tape, and punched cards.

One of the current projects at the The Computer Museum History Center
(http://www.computerhistory.org) is the construction of a media
archiving station that allows conversion of 'obsolete' media to a more
permanent and accessible format such as CDROM. HP has donated hardware
to help start this process by allowing us to read paper tapes which seem
to have the shortest lifetime.

Anyone with a card reader or 7-track tape drive give me a call ASAP!

Gavin has a very good point that its not enough to just copy the bits to
a new media, that you need to be able to understand the 'meta-data' and
structure of the information. We should be able to read (CM) STORE tapes
since the History Center just acquired its first HP3000 system a Series
58 (uh, anyone want to donate a 9-track tape drive?).

Regards,

Lee Courtney
President
--
Monterey Software Group Inc.          Voice: 650-964-7052
1350 Pear Avenue, Suite J             Fax:   650-964-6735
Mountain View, California 94043-1302  Pager: 408-237-1705
                                      Email: leec AT-SIGN slip DOT net
http://www.editcorp.com/Businesses/MontereySoftware

Mainframe Network, Session, and Batch Authentication, Audit, and
Access Control for Hewlett-Packard 3000 Business Servers