In article . com, Des
Higgins says...
Tape?? Tape?? Luxury; in my day we had to take the hot valves from
the glass blowing department and design our own circuits and invent
computers and keep the operating system in our heads (backwards
because that was how you loaded it). We had to wait 40 years before
tape was invented. We had wax tablets and small boys as back up.

:-)

I've still got backups of some Fortran software I wrote on punched paper
rolls. There is probably no equipment left on the planet to load the
software now (unless it is in a museum).

More recently I've got stacks of backups on 5.25" disks but no hardware
to read them any more. My archive on 3.5" disks are also heading the
same way with only one computer left in my possession capable of reading
them.

Makes you wonder just how recoverable various important National
archives are? We take it for granted that various paper based records
can go back several hundred years, but what of digitally stored records?
--
David in Normandy.
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