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Re: [ARSCLIST] Telemetry Tapes
Lou Judson wrote:
Do they have starlets in NASA? If so I chose the wrong profession.
One has to ask, though, did they never make a safety copy even if it is
telemetry? THAT is a FEMA style travesty!
I spent 5.5 years on Apollo, much of it at Houston. There are too many
stories to tell, but this go-round is typical of what happened on that
project and others.
The quantity of telemetry tapes was incomprehensible. Duplication and
preservation were not budgeted and not of interest to the overworked
staff. As we are all aware, preservation after the fact is seldom as
practical as designing it in, but there was neither time nor funding to
put it in place before the data came streaming down.
Remember, please, this was the era of slow computing. Virtually any
modern desktop machine today will vastly outperform even the ground
computers of that project - a weird array of five computers running in
7094 emulation mode (the 360 OS wasn't available when the software was
being developed).
The tape formats are long obsolete, though as I recall not 'proprietary'
per se. Complicating matters, though Apollo was nominally unclassified,
there were classified components, mission elements and documentation.
Mike
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mrichter@xxxxxxx
http://www.mrichter.com