You see it all the time in science fiction: the heroes find old data, read it, and learn how to save the day. But how realistic is that? Forget aliens. Could you read a stack of punch cards or a 9-track tape right now? Probably not, and those are just a handful of decades in […]
Save a bunch of files on a good ol’ magnetic hard drive, leave it in a box, and they’ll probably still be there a couple of decades later. The lubricants might have all solidified and the heads jammed in place, but if you can get things moving, you’ll still have your data. As explained over […]
Unless you handle the backups for a large corporation, bank, or government entity, you likely haven’t stored much data to tape recently. But magnetic storage used to be fairly mainstream back in the 1980s for all kinds of computer programs. Plenty of computers used standard cassette tapes for this too but you couldn’t just copy […]
At least some in the audience will at some time in the distant past have loaded or saved a program on cassette, with an 8-bit home computer. The machine would encode binary as a series of tones which could be recorded to the tape and then later retrieved. If you consider the last sentence you’ll […]