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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 8/20/2018 10:35 AM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> 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.  :-)

If one google:

recover old data tapes

there are some hits.

No idea how specialized, serious and capable they are.

Arne