Old but gold: Paper tape and punched cards still getting the job done – just about As storage media grows denser and more complex over time, it's worth remembering that older formats were sometimes far more durable. Sometimes. Paper tape, for example, can be prodigiously long-lasting. Unless, of course, it receives some unwanted attention. "I did once open a box to find a moth had nested inside and feasted …
I still take care of some punch tape kit, mostly for machine control. Yes, you are quite correct, the day to day working tapes are mylar ... and so are the Masters.
For the pedants out there, yes, they are also archived on modern media. But the actual backups are on mag tape. We may be luddites, but we're not stupid :-)
A friend from a former job worked down a salt mine in Wales with historic records. Mostly for medical products, where the permission to use is dependent on the original clinical trial data being available. If it stops being available in the original, then the drug management agency (I don't know what the UK one is called, this happened back in EU times) can revoke their consent and have it pulled from the shelves. He had paper notes going back to the 1930's and every generation of digital storage since. He was always on the hunt for old readers.
Charlie Stross speculated, in 'Greenhouse' that there will be a dark ages between the end of analogue records and the beginning of whatever permanent memory we settle on in the 21st century when few records remain for archaeologists. I don't disbelieve him.
This is why my personal records are all ASCII, with no fancy formatting whatsoever. I've got everything I've ever written back to the late sixties ... hopefully it'll be useful to somebody some day.
No, I don't think any of my shit is of earth-shaking importance ... but I do know how useful the farm diaries of my great grandfather and grandfather are.
Good thinking.
Do you allow yourself any markup?
My (digital) notes don't go back anywhere near that far but for the last almost three decades (yikes!) I've been using a tiny wiki (many thanks, Mr Cunningham) running on localhost for note keeping about absolutely everything. The formatted version is easier to read (or there wouldn't be much point!) but all the editing is still directly in plain wikitext[0], so it has to be comprehensible in that form as well[1].
[0] in my foolish youth (well, younger than today!) I did plan to "drop in" a Javascript editor to do all the bold etc WYSIWYG but honestly I'm glad I never did - for many reasons.
[1] having tried too pull together a complete, can be presented to the auditor, document from a slew of pages in Confluence[2][3], I've stuck to a simple, if idiosyncratic, internal format for my own stuff. Especially as Confluence changed formats, for no obvious improvement to the end user, so it was obvious anything that worked this week was doomed as soon as somebody decided "we must always use the latest version" without considering, again, whether both our second-party processing and third-party Marketplace addons would still function...
[2] Sorry, this started as a simple enquiry as to whether jake allowed himself the luxury of, say, a bit of Markdown and ended with a rant about software that doesn't work well as an archival format, IMO, but I suppose that is still on topic...
[3] crap 'export' facilities[4], "Print to to PDF" unable to collate pages, let alone manage top'n'tailing a complete document, nothing showing up in the Marketplace (at the time)...
[4] was able to read the mangled, partially XML, export by finding a parser that wasn't totally compliant to start with and slicing off its malformed input error reporting, mwahaha - fun but worrying if you are thinking of project documentation lasting, and growing, over years...
reStructuredText (reST) is a good format for keeping notes in over the very long term. Markdown is similar, but lacks some of the features and so isn't as suited to documents over say half a dozen pages.
reST is used in a lot of documentation systems, so software that can read it is likely to be around for a very long time. And even if it isn't, the basic markup format looks enough like the rendered format that it's quite readable just as basic ASCII text. For example, headings are just text underlined with minus, underscore, or equal (-, _, =) characters to give you different heading levels. Tables are just ASCII text arranged to look like a table, with columns being defined by spaces between the '-' characters used to underline the column headings. Bullet points are just asterisks. Etc.
If you don't have software that understands reST format, the plain ASCII text version is quite readable as is. If you didn't know that reST existed, you would think that someone had just taken the effort to make nice text files that looked good anyway.
I keep all my notes in Zim, which is a note taking program. It stores each note as a separate text file in reStructuredText (reST) format in a series of hierarchical directories. Even without Zim all the notes are perfectly understandable even with just an ASCII text editor.
"Confluence - where information goes to die"
My work cheatsheets are all plain text files. I keep getting crap to put them in Confluence, and I double-click them and they open in seconds - "Can Confluence do that?"
I can also easily search them - "Can Confluence do that?"
If I need fancy formatting (and I don't) then I can hand-write the HTML.
I don't use any kind of "markup" because I know at least 16 mutually incompatible flavors and they all suck. For example, Jira can mark a block of text as SQL code, but you can't highlight an individual line to bring attention to the broken part of the code in the Jira ticket. WTAF.
Did you perchance mean Charles Stross's Glasshouse[1]?
(Actually, I hope not, as then there is some more Stross I've not yet read whilst waiting for the next pauperback to be released)
[1] Warning: that link contains spoilers!
Yes, that's what comes of using human memory rather than searching the internet.
Because in my head, a Greenhouse is a Glasshouse.
According to Forgotten Scripts by Cyrus Gordon Linear A, and the hieroglyphs, can be read as a Semitic language using the same syllables as Linear B used for Greek. It's far from my field to verify this; Gordon seems to have been a respected scholar in his field but also prone to strange theories and I've no idea which one this is.
Especially with the way some people seem fanatically keen to wipe out any trace of themselves ever having existed -- and often, in the process, end up depriving future generations of the ability to enjoy retro-computing by destroying perfectly usable storage devices, on the off-chance that someone might find some incomplete personal details that are publicly available elsewhere.
Knowledge, discourse, and broad culture, in the course of three decades, has become concentrated on the Internet. Some of this co-exists with the same information expressed in print on paper or on physical media such as film emulsion. An increasing amount of digitally stored information has never had a presence in a different format.
Thusly arrives the question of origin and establishing provenance. This matter pertains also in the context of historical research; as an example, the complete Oxford English Dictionary traces etymology; this depends upon the availability of relevant documents, and to a degree on their authenticity.
Digitally stored date/culture is malleable with respect to its content and to its attribution. Plagiarism, common enough in the analogue era, is rife in these times of 'cut and paste'; AI can produce convincing tracts drawn from numerous digital sources; also it sometimes adds fictitious information, e.g. non-existent judgements referenced in legal submissions.
The point being, digitally represented data possess all the problems - fragility of storage, unreliability of sources, and confabulation - found in traditional presentations, and some. All that before AI's contribution is considered.
A pressing difficulty is establishment of authenticity. This has to be in place at the time of release of data to other people. Perhaps, an extension of the currently silly usage of NFTs on a blockchain is required; the blockchain could record lines, and branches, of derivation from the original work. This requirement is entirely separate from issues of 'ownership' and monetisation of data.
I have personally participated in different websites with their forums on some esoteric topics. (Different alias to El Reg). Two of these just went blue and upped daisies. Gone, from one day to the next. One because of bad hardware, the other because the owners no longer cherished the labour of love it had become.
The niche topics that they hosted may have been backed up on archive.org. Or not. The one that had outlived its owners good wishes had the content sold and is behind a paywall (for which I am not receiving any royalties, not did I consent to that move, alas, consent was probably in the fine print).
The forums of the website that died was probably the only first hand accounts of planning, building, operations and neglect of various objects in its subject matter. Niche topics, sure, but are part of the record of those times. Now, just disappeared in to the ether.
Putting this info on Reddit isn't any better. Nor Google. One day, these operations can just start pining for the the fjords too. Indeed, the content can be just deleted at the whim of the owner.
Perhaps when an appropriate archive format is settled on, the various content hosters can also come together on an export that would allow national libraries to collect this and maintain it for future generations. (eg, an actual export from Wiki, or Confluence, that can be read and archived by others).
The problem with the Library of Alexandria and similar collections was that they collected what was in many cases the only copy of a document, so this was lost when there was a fire or an invasion. (The advantage of clay tablets was that they were improved by fire!)
With digital documents there are many versions, so they should be more durable. Unless (1) the original website owner set permissions that were unfriendly to web crawlers (I've made that mistake) or (2) the entire Web gets commandeered by some Billionnaire, who reduces it to a single copy.
> With digital documents there are many versions, so they should be more durable
Ok, can I change a word here first: > With digital documents there are many instances, so they should be more durable
This *used* to be the case (or so it seemed).
Back in the day, when the Web was young, when somebody found that an interesting file was being shared, they'd grab a copy for their own use - and then make that copy available from their server. And yes, you'd expect to get attribution as well. And (usually) it was legally sharable as well. So the next person along had two URLs and hopefully one of them was still active; then there were three URLs. A copy of a software library, or a driver for an uncommon bit of kit. Not everyone had their own server, but you'd see the material appearing as attachments to forum posts as well.
Then - something changed. And suddenly everybody was just posting That One URL where the manufacturer had shared the driver or where the library could be found. Great if you stumbled across the post that same week, but years later, tough.
So now you will find so many posts that say "well, I solved this by downloading the file xxxxx.yyy from the OEM support page here, you should do the same". Shame that OEM went bust/was bought out and you are lucky to even get a 404 back.
Which is a problem, but the other situation was often not different. The file once was stored in twenty places, but there was no list of twenty URLs. Instead, there were many pages with only one or two of them. And they didn't work, and they didn't work because people who had once stored it somewhere said "there are twenty places where this is stored, nineteen will be just fine" before they deleted it. I have a few pages specifically intended to archive things, and I have designed a few safety mechanisms to try to keep them available for as long as possible. For example, I have built a link shortener and I always give out those addresses, which means that if I ever have to move these to a different URI, for example if the domain name I used to use is no longer available to me*, then I can change the place the shortened link goes without breaking anywhere it is posted (the benefits of running the shortener yourself). Still, if that bus with my name on it comes along, I wouldn't count on the longevity of this system, which is why I manually point archive sites at such pages when I've made them.
* Some of the archives I've made are hosted on someone else's domain because they don't relate to me personally but might relate to them, but that makes it more fragile than if they're on my domain, because I'm a little obsessive about not breaking links even if it means my site's directories are not the cleanest.
Yup. There's valuable stuff on YouTube amongst the terabytes of pure crap, and I download and save it. (actually I download EVERYTHING and play it with a REAL video player, so I avoid the broken YT player and ads, but I delete most of it afterwards)
For example, Rooster Teeth was incredible, especially in its early decades, and now its gone titsup after years of mismanagement. Literally thousands of videos, possibly hundreds of thousands will probably eventually go away in the fight over rights to the content.
Websnark was another hidden great, and both incarnations have died after the owner suffered health issues. Fortunately, it's on archive.org. Most of the hundreds of webcomics it discussed that have now themselves vanished without even a trace on archive.org
Google has managed to squander and piss away its excellent netnews archive.
I don't see any of these people ever willing or able to archive any of it.
"both incarnations have died after the owner suffered health issues. Fortunately, it's on archive.org"
Wills are a great resource for family history. Someone set up a website inviting people to send him transcripts they'ed made of wills. It was a useful site but when he announced he was closing it due to ill health he declined an offer from a friend of mine to take it over and run it. archive.org has a copy but from an earlier stage less useful than it might have been.
"Page-Mitchell also collects LaserDiscs, and told us that the disc rot phenomenon, where optical discs degrade over time and become unreadable, was highly manufacturer-dependent. He claimed that one well-known manufacturer's facility "was just not up to the job, and contaminants cause disc rot in those."
IIRC the PDO Blackburn plant that made most of the CDs that suffered 'bronzing' started as a LaserDisc plant before adapting the process to CDs. Was their process just as bad for LaserDiscs?
There's an additional problem with LaserDiscs - they're double sided and made in two separate parts that are then glued together: any failure in the glue and the reflective layer oxidises.
I believe PDO was responsible for many of the dodgy disks, though others can fail for a variety of reasons.
It's nice to know someone is still collecting them - I have loads I would like to dispose of!
At least in the US, the plant responsible for the "laser rot" problem in the early Eighties was the MCA Discovision plant in Fremont, California. I bought my first laserdisc player, a Pioneer VP1000, in 1981, and experienced about a 30% failure rate with discs from that plant. Yet in the same period, discs manufactured in Japan by Pioneer had zero problems.
Eventually, Pioneer, probably feeling that all those defective discs from the MCA plant were giving the format a bad name, bought the plant, sent in Japanese engineers and quality control inspectors, and within a year the defect rate was near zero.
Pioneer's players and high-quality discs saved the Laserdisc format from early failure, after MCA and Philips gave up on it. (The early Philips players were notoriously failure-prone.)
Although low-cost VCRs with "good enough" quality took over the mass market, laserdisc remained a collectors' format for many years. The "extras" we now take for granted on DVDs, such as directors' commentaries, deleted scenes, and "making of" documentaries, first appeared on laserdiscs from Criterion, who specialized (and still do) in highest-quality restorations and transfers.
>Eventually, Pioneer, probably feeling that all those defective discs from the MCA plant were giving the format a bad name, bought the plant, sent in Japanese engineers and quality control inspectors, and within a year the defect rate was near zero.
And in this present timeline...
Eventually, Pioneer, probably feeling that all those defective discs from the MCA plant would have to be replaced by customers with new one instead of lasting for years, bought the plant, fired Pioneers engineers and quality control inspectors, brought MCA's managers to Japan and within a year the defect rate was into lucrative double digits, and Pioneers executives could hold their heads high when meeting with their American tech business peers.
Somewhere, in the attic, I have punched tapes from my early years at university. I had forgotten about them until this article. Now I don't know whether to seek them out; I won't be able to read them. Something else for my children to look skywards and roll their eyes.
Perhaps my grandchildren could make kite-tails from them: Cloud computing!
Not recommended. If you build such a thing as a one-off, "just for my pile of old tapes", it is essentially an untested prototype. Chances are it'll completely balls-up your irreplaceable data for any number of reasons. Better to find somebody who knows what they are doing. Many will help out just because they can, at no cost to you, and will stop before damaging anything (such as upon finding brittle tape), and will usually offer names of other folks who may be able to help further.
Even though they may offer their services for free, at least bring 'em some beer, or a nice bottle of whisk(e)y for their efforts. Or perhaps offer to donate a few quid "to their hardware fund".
Begin your search at a local computer club and/or Uni.
> Begin your search at a local computer club and/or Uni.
Sigh. Do local computer clubs even still exist? I haven't seen one in decades, which is sad, because that's how I got my career started in the '80s.
And my Uni has NO clue what paper tape even is, unless you managed to find some of the old services staff (not the teaching staff) who are definitely not "customer facing"
Which is sad, because I still have my stacks of cards with the Uni seal on them.
Given a roll of irreplaceable paper tape I would carefully photograph or otherwise image it in its entirety. Then the problem becomes one of image processing but ultimately could even be done with human eyeballs.
Other media might also be captured using very low power lasers in the case of laser disc, the various CD format media including DVDs or very sensitive magnetic field sensing devices in the case of tapes, floppy and hard disks.
Basically the approach archeologists take when faced with papyrus scrolls that cannot be unrolled such as those from Pompei - use advanced imaging technologies and reconstruct the text from the recovered images but leave the artefact intact.
History would suggest carving your records into a granite wall is probably the best option for millennia spanning longevity. "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" ;)
I'll bet if you ask at a local Uni, you'll discover there is somebody near you with the hobby of playing with such old records. They can probably recover the raw data from those old tapes, assuming the paper is not too brittle ... but even then, there are methods that can be used to stabilize the tape enough to read them a few times. And even failing that, one could sit and manually transcribe the tapes.
Is it worth it? Only you can decide. But I'm here to tell you that I've never helped someone with such a project where they didn't find a long forgotten happy surprise or five.
When dealing with old, crusty archives, remember the credo "First, do no harm".
Scanning the tapes on a flatbed scanner might be a good start, especially if they've split along folds so that a good few fragments could be scanned at once.
Not that I've ever had to try that but before I left Belfast I had boxes of cards read and downloaded to floppies. Whether any of the old pieces of kit with floppy drives still work is another matter.
Another generation on an my daughter's honours project was stored on one of those click-of-death style drives because that was what her zoo. dept. used back then so I had to buy a drive in order to transfer it to something better. The drive's never been used for anything since. nor, I suspect, has the project.
A generation further than that and the grandchildren have their phones and laptops. Is anything of that backed up on anything fit for long term storage? (Somebody else's computer doesn't qualify.)
The only person who can answer if that data is worth recovering is the person who has control of the media.
Speaking for myself, I find my great grandfather's and grandfather's farm diaries to be invaluable ... but that's on paper, with (usually) good ink. And they both had much better penmanship than I do ... probably because I've been using either a typewriter or a computer since the mid '60s or thereabouts.
Diaries are superb historical sources because they tell how things were from a perspective other then the official sources. One local diarist tells the story of the '45 from a little way off the rebels' line of march and the panic caused because they didn't know, of course that they were off the line.
Another diarist saw the initial run of the Liverpool-Manchester railway and adds that a number of stage coaches stopped operating that route within a day or so - not the long, slow accumulation of losses one might expect.
I now wish I'd kept by own but, like you - handwriting.
There are Babylonian clay tablets containing cuneiform text that are almost 4,000 years old and still readable. Some of them contain records of solar eclipses and other astronomical events that are still being used by modern astronomers to investigate how the Earth's rotation rate has changed over the millennia. Now THAT is durable data storage!
"Now THAT is durable data storage!"
They weren't sure about that so really important stuff was carved in stone, just to be sure.
Most of the inscriptions from the ancient world seem to have been accounts. There must be a lesson for us in there but I'm not sure what.
Last I heard, only around 2 or 3% of all the tablets ever found have actually been read/translated (half a million, give or take, are in museums, with more being found daily). I started learning cuneiform in it's various guises when I was young and deluded, thinking one could actually make a living contributing to knowledge of the past ... and it seemed more interesting than the mundane Latin and Greek, or even Aramaic. Perhaps I'll take it up again if I ever retire. There has GOT to be something of interest in all those unread tablets besides "<this year> billy-bob had 15 she-goats with 24 kids, harvested 22 bushels of wheat and made 75 gallons of wine and 40 pounds of cheese" and the like ... wouldn't it be cool to be the first to read it after 5,000 years or so?
At former POE I saw magnetic cards, sort of punch cards but magnetic? AIUI they had been used into the nineties.
Same place machinists came in asking if we could read or write some big floppy disks with CNC instructions?
Sure, at home if you do not mind?
OK, here: Box of 8 inch disks...
Sorry, no.
A month or so ago, I did the annual cleaning & adjusting (as needed) of a couple of 8" floppy drives that have been in near daily use since the late 1970s. They are attached to a couple pieces of equipment at a machine shop located in SillyConValley. I've replaced the read/write heads & the motors a couple times each with NOS parts that I squirreled away in the '90s .... sometimes being a packrat pays the bills.
Before you ask, I have Arduino-based fall-overs tested and ready, but the machinists hate the idea. They don't feel/sound/smell right, and the timing is all wrong (it's not), so we stick to the floppies. And half inch, 9-track tape. And some mylar punch tape. And Hollerith cards. We have a climate controlled closet with NOS media for all the machines, plus a couple shelves of my rebuild kit. It's probably enough to continue for over a century. It'll certainly outlive me :-)
In this day and age, the care and feeding of half a dozen genuine tool and die makers (and about the same number of up and coming apprentices) is far more important than being modern. Machines quite simply can not reproduce the magic they do on a daily basis.
[0] New Old Stock ... brand new product that's been on the shelf for a while.
"genuine tool and die makers (and about the same number of up and coming apprentices) is far more important than being modern"
Especially the apprentices.
The danger, of course, is the tool maker's children going into politics - they are apt to make such a fuss about who their parents were.
> the tool maker's children going into politics - they are apt to make such a fuss about who their parents were.
Must resist the obvious retort that any politician doing that is clearly just another tool they made...
Nope, failed to resist that temptation. Weak willed. No wonder my New Year's Resolutions never last until February.
SmartEveryDay on Made In America and the lack of toolmakers. It makes for an interesting watch and analysis of the supply chain.
magnetic cards, sort of punch cards but magnetic
Possibly from the IBM Mag Card Selectric Typewriter.
Was going to say I thought it was for accounting or tabulating, as there was a suitcase sized box on the floor with a maybe a feeder or stacker. But there is something that looks like the box in the video, and until around 2000 managers and engineers were dictating to typists. And a few years later still complaining, that typing email was slower than speaking + paper mail.
My first job included a monthly defragment of the Vax 11/780 system disc, achieved by performing a VMS image backup to a number of tapes and restoring the backup from tape. Even with backup/verify, I dreaded the day when one of the tapes couldn't be read upon restore. Fortunately, it never happened.
Here's an interesting bit of little-known knowledge: Last time I checked (fifteenish years ago), SAIL's original DECtape "Permanent Files" from 1966 to 1972, and then the 7-bit DART tape archives (Dump And Restore Technique ... essentially full system backups of the SAIL PDP-10), from 1972 to 1990, were available to researchers at Stanford's Green Library (in "The Digital Collection"). Access is (was? see below) restricted to people who have permission from the original authors.
I know there was some effort to put all that into a more modern archive format, and then put the results online, right around the turn of the century. I do not know how far the effort managed to get.
Note that the interaction between SAIL and SLAC (and The Big Dish folks) mostly wasn't official, but tapes between the three were exchanged fairly regularly. SAIL mostly helped with knotty algorithm wrestling on large (for the time!) data sets, robotics, and imaging..
The following map shows how close these three campuses are to each other. The now sadly demolished D.C. Power[0] building, where SAIL was located, is currently home to Portola Pastures, a horse establishment (Just east of Rossotti's, you'll have to zoom in one notch to see the label).
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4071914,-122.1815786,4723m/data=!3m1!1e3
[0] Nothing to do with Electricity, except peripherally ... it was named after Donald C. Power, a corporate director of GT&E, who had built the building as a research lab, and then gifted it to Stanford. Lore has it that SAIL (originally SAIP, "Project") got the last part of it's name from the building ...
Many years ago, I was repairing a machine that a company used to bend steel pipes. The machine was essential to their business so they had the control computer put in a van and driven down to us. The first problem was that the core memory which normally held the program had stopped remembering things, so they had started loading the program every morning by reading the punched tape via the reader on the teletype that sat on top of the box with the computer. The combination of age and greasy hands handling the tape had caused significant deterioration and finally they could no longer read the tape. It was the only copy of the program that they had.
Fixing the core memory was easy - a transistor had died.
Fixing the tape took me the whole day with an optical reader and a box of adhesive tape patches. Finally, we could read the tape without getting checksum errors, so I cut three copies and could finally send the machine, the fresh tapes and a very happy van driver on their way. At the time, this machine had probably already been obsolete for 20 years.
1. Oiled paper tapes (rolls). These were designed to be used in Teletype® paper tape reader/punch units. The oil in the tapes lubricated the mechanisms. The oil was not apparant when you handled the tapes, but would leach out if the tapes were stored too long before use.
2. Dry paper tapes (fanfold). These were designed for photoelectric paper tape readers, but could also be used in Teletype® readers. All our PDP-8 system software came from DEC on this type of paper tape.
Holroyd also works with punched cards, which he noted can last indefinitely in the right conditions. "The main challenge," he said, "is to avoid dropping a card deck and mixing up all the cards."
Decks will eventually be dropped. That is why you punch sequence numbers in columns 73-80, and learned to use a card sorter. Many assemblers and compilers from those days would ignore, or had a command-line option to ignore, columns 73-80.
I used punch cards many years ago. Standard practice was to use a magic marker to draw a diagonal line across the edge of the deck. Even if you didn't have access to a card sorter you could resort the cards manually by just lining up the marks on the edges of the cards. You generally wrote on the edge of the deck anyway to say what it was, so adding a diagonal line while you were at it wasn't a problem.
I was a typesetter. The Linotype imagesetter, that produced the print-quality positives to make the negatives for the printing plates, had it's fonts loaded from punch tape.
If you bought a new font, you got a short roll of punch tape for the Linotronic and an 8" floppy to load into the Pagitek photosetters - big beasts with three times more keys than a PC for formatting text.
Imagine coding raw HTML while only visualising what the output would be. No WYSIWYG as it was known back then. PCs and DTP were only just starting to happen at the time.
Imagine coding raw HTML while only visualising what the output would be."
Like most of us here probably did when creating our first web page in Notepad or similar text editor. Or adding some of the limited HTLM markup allowed on these here forums :-)
Some people still use TeX from the command line :-)
"Like most of us here probably did when creating our first web page in Notepad or similar text editor. Or adding some of the limited HTLM markup allowed on these here forums"
No, not like that. In both of those cases, you could write the thing and then take a look at it before publishing. On these forums, there's that preview button which you can use to test that the HTML is working well. I used it quite recently when I wanted to use the <del> tag. As you can tell from the tag appearing in this comment, it isn't allowed. You can get a similar effect using the s tag (no brackets allowed or it will insert the tag). Similarly, my attempt to use <ins> was not permitted either, though I didn't find a replacement. If you were writing your first HTML in notepad, then you were on a machine capable of running a GUI program that could read and display your file, and I have a feeling you used it to see what it looked like.
From their description, they didn't have the luxury of running out one copy to check their work, nor could the computer give them enough information to detect all the possible errors.
My brother has been going through my mom's basement cleaning out stuff that has been there for decades, and among the finds as he's dug deeper into the "storage" area in the unfinished part of the basement in the past few weeks are boxes and boxes totalling probably several hundred pounds of punched cards my dad saved from his early research (econ prof) when he was doing his PhD at Berkeley and his early years as a professor. There were a number of boxes from Manila where he was a visiting professor for a year (I went to kindergarten in Quezon City) which I imagine cost a lot to ship halfway around the world - though the Rockefeller Foundation was picking up the tab for everything including moving expenses.
It is all going to the recycling bin. Not much call for old Fortran 66 code and boxes of punched cards containing numbers that I presume are some sort of macroeconomic data from the 50s and 60s these days!
A professor I had when I was a comp sci student collected old punch cards but I recall he only collected the "special" cards that were embossed with the logo of the institution. I looked at the ones my dad had where they were marked it was just printed on the bottom of the generic card. None of them seemed to have any special logos that came with the blank card before punching/printing.
When my brother found a map from the Rockefeller Foundation showing the university grounds and how to get to our house from there I checked Apple Maps on my phone and figured out where our house was. It wasn't easy since so much has changed but it appears the house is still there. Couldn't figure out where our school was, that may no longer exist. Most of the street names appear to have changed in 50 years so it isn't as simple as looking up addresses, and since we had a driver my mom can't remember exactly where the school was in relation to the house.
> Not much call for ... some sort of macroeconomic data from the 50s and 60s these days!
Somewhere, there is someone who would love to get hold of that and is frustrated that all they have is paper copies of papers(!) with samples of the data (and probably not raw values) that they have been retyping: their thesis and re-analysis of the Odd Thing That Happened In 1952 And The Recovery From It would then be complete.
Of course, the chances of finding that person...
I have, sitting on my shelf, a punchcard (creased) with the text "University Computing Center" printed across it.
I worked there while getting my degree, repairing the Teletype ASR-33 terminals used as timesharing terminals.
While I'm glad I saved the card, I wish I had taken a few photos. Oh, well...
Thanks for the memories...
For a few years I worked in a Western Union shop in Mahwah, NJ that refurbished Teletype and other machines of the day. Much of the paper tape seemed to have been impregnated with a light oil. Extended storage of some of these tapes in a sealed plastic bag would cause the oil to leech out of the paper which then damaged the tape. Test tapes used many times a day were made of Mylar. The Teletype machines used pins to sense the holes. Newer design General Electric Terminet's used light beams to sense the holes in the paper tape and ran at a higher speed. The IBM 1403 high speed printer used a loop of tape for carriage control punched out by a printer pool operator to tell the printer the size of the paper and how to move the paper. I would think it would not be a big deal for someone to come up with an app that used a flatbed scanner or equivalent to scan damaged paper tape and make corrections to damaged areas, though you would have to teach the app about 5 and 8 level coding for different vintage machines.
I repaired model 33s when a university student.
I had my own, built up for me from parts I brought into the Teletype service center in Framingham, MA, by some unknown tech who took pity on a nerdy 18 year old. I think they charged me $150, which was an absolute bargain, considering I had brought in a typing unit. I'll be forever grateful to that nameless tech, and have tried to "pay it forward".
It's been done:
https://github.com/digitaltrails/punchedcardreader
https://www.e-basteln.de/computing/papertape/overview/
Usagi Electric has developed something to read/punch them too - he has the oldest operational valve computer in North America (possibly the world) amongst other things
"Holroyd also works with punched cards, which he noted can last indefinitely in the right conditions. "The main challenge," he said, "is to avoid dropping a card deck and mixing up all the cards.""
As I was once told the trick is after getting the cards were in the right order, on the edge of the stack of cards to mark a diagonal line across the edges of the cards on two sides, that way if dropped and restacked it was easy to see which card was out of order and by doing two sides reversed cards were easily spotted too.
"by doing two sides reversed cards were easily spotted"
That's what the diagonal cut in one corner was for.
I know of several places where there were different diagonal cuts to differentiate between (for example) code and data. Useful for quickly manually stripping out the data cards for another set of data to be run against the same code.
The world was very different back then.
I’d love to know what is worth keeping long term and what isn’t, I guess all archivists would too.
An absolutely impossible task now.
The volume of data being stored is insane.
Just consider all the iot devices storing mostly junk - millions of devices.
All the mobile phone photos and videos, billions of them every day.
And now a tsunami of AI slop washing up into storage for no valid reason.
Should our civilisation collapse and a new one rise a thousand years later, the volume of crap archaeologists will have to wade through will be unprecedented.
As always:
Migrate all your old data when you change media
In the long term it's cheaper and less painful than having to try and resurrect fragile artifacts
I put an entire CD changer (500 discs) onto one LTO5 tape, another LTO5 held several hundred Exabytes
The CDs were already going bad. ten years later someone tried to read the exabyte tapes (not knowing I'd duplicated the data) and found all the drives had failed
There's a professor with a garage full of NASA 9-track tapes he wants to ressurect - I've been quoted £250/reel. Suddenly he lost interest
My old man has a programming book for Cobol, I believe. The book is intact. The punched cards at the back of the book were intact. The included floppy disk - 5 1/4" - was sadly unreadable.
Another ironical place to store eletronics is a salt mine. The same brine that could destroy eletronics that can rust away is impossible inside an ultra-dry salt mine.
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