Re: [ARSCLIST] Telemetry Tapes

[steven c <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Richter" <mrichter@xxxxxxx>
> 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.
> 
As a side comment...I recently re-found my FORTRAN textbook, c.1973.
It said "The new IBM 360 system can be equipped with as much as a full
megabyte of resident memory, though few of them are so equipped..."

Steven C. Barr