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

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Monday, 20 August 2018 15:00:14 UTC+1, 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?
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I would have jumped at the opportunity many years ago, but probably as
> part of a (smallish) team rather than by myself.
> 
> -- 
> The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the
> intelligent are full of doubt.                 -- Bertrand Russell

Wrt tapes from seismological surveys etc: at one time, 
field-originated tapes would likely have been "gapless" 
tapes, which in general weren't routinely readable on 
"industry standard" magtape drives used for archival and 
interchange. 

Gapless tapes had more in common with data-logger formats.
There were some drives which claimed to be able to read both
"standard" and gapless e.g. as advertised in
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1653755

Were such gapless tapes still around much in the 1990s? No
idea - but preserving the original lossless recordings was 
probably better value (for the exploration companies)
than sending a survey team out to repeat the survey because
the tapes had become unreadable over time, and data had been
lost.

It's a long time ago, there may be errors in the above.