>>>>> "Jon" == Jon \"maddog\" Hall via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:

> In 1975 I was working for Aetna Life and Casualty in Hartford, Connecticut.   At that time Aetna
> was the largest multiline Insurance company and also the largest commercial user of IBM equipment
> in the "Free World" (which goes to show that with enough qualifiers you can be the best of
> anything).

> In any case we had 500,000 12" magnetic tape drives on site, with another 100,000 in a salt mine
> for "long term storage".   For those tapes the "retention time" was 9999 years.

> Some of the older tapes were marked as seven-track, 128 bits-per-inch.

> I asked my boss about trying to read those tapes, and he assured me there was a seven-track tape
> drive stored along with the tapes, wrapped in bubble wrap.

> "Yes", I said, "but where is the computer that can attach to that tape drive, and the OS that can
> drive the tape controller, and the operator that can boot and run that operating system?"

> My boss put his finger to his lips and said 'Shhhhhhhhh".

I'm in the same boat with 43,000+ pieces of media offsite at Iron
Mountain in a mix of DAT, DLT 7k, SDLT320 and LTO6 media that might
need to be restored.

And let's ignore the 8mm tapes that sat in a couple of boxes for 15+
yeats without anyone touching them ... even after I scrapped the tape
library to read them.