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Historic NASA Project Files and Software Appear in Amiga 2500 EBay Listing

71 points by mmastrac 9y ago

userbinator 9y ago
the system was used in NASA's telemetry labs and is decked out with a NASA asset and inventory tags from 2005 ...2005, a time when "telemetry" hadn't yet gained its more sinister meaning of "privacy invasion", P2P meant you could find just about anything on the Internet, and computing freedom was pretty high. Of course, the Space Shuttle program was still active too. But for me, and likely many others, the word "telemetry" now has a negative connotation.
- engi_nerd 9y ago
  I made a living doing airborne telemetry and instrumentation for almost a decade. Those words, in my professional context, meant that I was an engineer who designed and operationally supported systems to gather data of all kinds (avionics buses, physical transducer readings), record that data, and transmit a crucial subset of that data to the ground for real-time monitoring by engineers. But "telemetry" and "instrumentation" have meanings in the tech world, and it's sad that one of the meanings carried in the "telemetry" suitcase is "privacy invasion".
dmead 9y ago
this belongs in a museum no?
- Jaruzel 9y ago
  Depends. There's nothing special about the Amiga itself; there are many 2500s out there. I DO think however, that the contents of the hard-drive need archiving and given over to archive.org - providing NASA are OK with that of course. What scares me a little bit is that the seller has clearly performed some 'write' operations on the data - you can see him running LHA to extract an archive. If he's done that then there is no telling what else he's done and what may have been lost or contaminated in the process. :( Looking at the price he's clearly just trying to cash in, and has no interest in it's real historic value.
  - slipstream- 9y ago
    Sellers trying to cash in is the worst thing about software/data preservation.
  - jacobush 9y ago
    Cashing in can be tempting, I can get that. But he should stay off the damn drive!
rootbear 9y ago
Something is seriously strange here. I work at NASA as a system administrator. That system should not still have the asset tag attached. Those are removed when an item goes through excess. Also, NO hard drives are to leave NASA with any data on them. I wipe all hard drives before I excess a system and I think the inventory people do it again. It's possible that this system was disposed of before that rule went into effect but that seems unlikely. I was able to zoom in on the photo on Ebay and get the asset tag number. That item is not in the asset database any longer, so it seems to have been legitimately excessed, and isn't stolen, but still, this is very odd.
- matheweis 9y ago
  I worked for a few years at a federal research facility that had some loaner equipment from NASA/JPL tied to the mars rover projects. It only takes one mistake by the intern asked to surplus the pile of old junk on the shelf who doesn’t recognize it for what it is...
doener 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848354

71 points by mmastrac 9y ago

the system was used in NASA's telemetry labs and is decked out with a NASA asset and inventory tags from 2005 ...2005, a time when "telemetry" hadn't yet gained its more sinister meaning of "privacy invasion", P2P meant you could find just about anything on the Internet, and computing freedom was pretty high. Of course, the Space Shuttle program was still active too. But for me, and likely many others, the word "telemetry" now has a negative connotation.

engi_nerd 9y ago
I made a living doing airborne telemetry and instrumentation for almost a decade. Those words, in my professional context, meant that I was an engineer who designed and operationally supported systems to gather data of all kinds (avionics buses, physical transducer readings), record that data, and transmit a crucial subset of that data to the ground for real-time monitoring by engineers. But "telemetry" and "instrumentation" have meanings in the tech world, and it's sad that one of the meanings carried in the "telemetry" suitcase is "privacy invasion".

dmead 9y ago

this belongs in a museum no?

Jaruzel 9y ago
Depends. There's nothing special about the Amiga itself; there are many 2500s out there. I DO think however, that the contents of the hard-drive need archiving and given over to archive.org - providing NASA are OK with that of course. What scares me a little bit is that the seller has clearly performed some 'write' operations on the data - you can see him running LHA to extract an archive. If he's done that then there is no telling what else he's done and what may have been lost or contaminated in the process. :( Looking at the price he's clearly just trying to cash in, and has no interest in it's real historic value.
- slipstream- 9y ago
  Sellers trying to cash in is the worst thing about software/data preservation.
- jacobush 9y ago
  Cashing in can be tempting, I can get that. But he should stay off the damn drive!

rootbear 9y ago

Something is seriously strange here. I work at NASA as a system administrator. That system should not still have the asset tag attached. Those are removed when an item goes through excess. Also, NO hard drives are to leave NASA with any data on them. I wipe all hard drives before I excess a system and I think the inventory people do it again. It's possible that this system was disposed of before that rule went into effect but that seems unlikely. I was able to zoom in on the photo on Ebay and get the asset tag number. That item is not in the asset database any longer, so it seems to have been legitimately excessed, and isn't stolen, but still, this is very odd.

matheweis 9y ago
I worked for a few years at a federal research facility that had some loaner equipment from NASA/JPL tied to the mars rover projects. It only takes one mistake by the intern asked to surplus the pile of old junk on the shelf who doesn’t recognize it for what it is...

doener 9y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848354 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15848354