[Info-vax] The (now lost) future of Alpha.

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 08/19/2018 12:14 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 8/18/2018 7:42 PM, already5chosen at yahoo.com wrote:
>> On Sunday, August 19, 2018 at 12:33:18 AM UTC+3, Paul Sture wrote:
>>> On 2018-08-07, Dave Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>>>> On 8/6/2018 11:21 AM, Bob Koehler wrote:
>>>>> In article <pk7pe6$c30$1 at gioia.aioe.org>, Chris 
>>>>> <xxx.syseng.yyy at gfsys.co.uk> writes:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> One of the reasons why unix and C became so popular in the early days
>>>>>> is because the C library provides platform independent access to i/o,
>>>>>> storage and a shed load of other functions. If I write a c program 
>>>>>> for
>>>>>> any flavour of unix, or linux and don't try to be too clever, it will
>>>>>> almost always compile and run on anything else.
>>>>>
>>>>>      You obvioulsy haven't done enough with ioctl().  Or am I being 
>>>>> "too
>>>>>      clever"?
>>>>>
>>>>>      Years ago, I found I had to get into ioctl() just to identify 
>>>>> the contents
>>>>>      of a magtape.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Basic always worked well with magtape.
>>>
>>> COBOL does too, and VMS COBOL can understand EBCDIC too.
>>>
>>>> Worthless capability now.  What's a magtape?
>>>
>>> Tape is not dead yet:
>>>
>>> "Reel talk: You know what's safely offline? Tape. Data protection 
>>> outfit Veeam inks deal with Quantum":
>>>
>>> <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/14/veeam_gets_taped_up_by_quantum_in_antiransomware_deal/> 
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the
>>> intelligent are full of doubt.                 -- Bertrand Russell
>>
>> Tapes are not dead as backup media. Because types are still a little 
>> cheaper per GB than reliable HDs. And significantly lighter.
>> Tapes are long dead for any other use.
>> So, the only program that has to know tape IO control codes is your 
>> backup program. But you likely wouldn't want to write it by yourself.
>>
> 
> Back in the day, we used tape for backup.  However, we were interested 
> in days, weeks, months, and maybe years.  Now I think back 20-30 years, 
> and figure that if I had a tape that old, either it would not be 
> readable, or, I would not have a tape drive for it.
> 
> Short term backup, yeah, but long term stuff, maybe not.
> 
> I keep stuff on several disks, on several computers, and still I worry. 
>   Nothing is forever.
> 

At the University we used tapes until it reached the point where a full
backup or restore would take more than 12 hours.  At that point we moved
to mirrored disks including one remote.

But tapes didn't go away completely. I still have 9 track and TK50 here
at my house for possible data recovery.  No DAT as they tended to be
unreliable at best.

bill