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

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Saturday, 25 August 2018 16:00:16 UTC+1, Paul Sture  wrote:
> 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'm going to guess that the IEEE article/adverts come from
around 1980. Why so? Says August 1980 at the bottom left corner 
of half of the pages (e.g. ones originally numbered 81 and 83) :)

Plus putting a VT100 in an ad picture (top of page 82) implies 
somewhere around that era too.

Interpreting the relatively recent past can sometimes be a bit 
easier than trying to predict the relatively near future :)

[fingers crossed this formats/quotes OK]
> 
> 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