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

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 08/20/2018 09:59 AM, Paul Sture wrote:
> On 2018-08-18, already5chosen at yahoo.com <already5chosen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
> 
> Probably the case.  COBOL's EBCDIC ability was very useful before
> networking was ubiquitous, but I doubt there's much call for it now.
> 
> Having written that, in the early 90s the oil industry was using a
> lot of tapes that were the output from seismological surveys, and they
> had huge archives of the things, which needed special storage (humidity
> etc) and were kept for years.  There was a small industry devoted to
> rescuing the data from old tapes.  I wonder what happened that that?

There are still some of us who can recover data  from tapes.  I doubt
there is any company that "specializes" in it as there really isn't
that much left to do.  Oh yeah, 8" floppies, too.  :-)


bill