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

[Paul Sture]

On 2018-08-20, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 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. 

Yes, such tapes were gapless. 'Infinite blocksize" was another
description bandied around.

> 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

Any idea which year that page relates to?

I did come across a tape controller and drive combination which
supported gapless tapes, circa 1995, the intention being to digitise
them in-house.  It's been a long time, but the names Pertec (possibly
the controller) and Tandberg (the drive) are lurking in my memory banks.

> 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.

In 1992, I spent many an hour conversing with someone who was teaching
the same client how to do tape conversions, and I got the impression
that there was a vast archive of tapes going back decades at multiple
clients which still needed preserving onto new tapes in lossless format.

Digitising them probably would not be lossless at that stage, so I
imagined they'd be around for quite a while yet.

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

I think you are reasonably spot on.  Geological surveys are
expensive, and where they were done decades ago, the geographical
areas they cover may not be currently accessible due to cost and
politics/conflicts etc.

-- 
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the
intelligent are full of doubt.                 -- Bertrand Russell