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And they were not replicated at the time because this data wasn't considered valuable, and on a larger scale, because there was not a culture of data preservati
by duskwuff 6y ago
And they were not replicated at the time because this data wasn't considered valuable, and on a larger scale, because there was not a culture of data preservation at NASA.
(It's not clear that they had the ability to replicate this data, anyway -- the reason it was lost was that they needed to reuse the magnetic tapes for data from another project!)
- jandrese 6y agoThat's why allowing the data to be replicated is so important if you care about preservation. It only takes a few happy mutants who think some otherwise boring data might be interesting and keeping a copy for themselves.
- duskwuff 6y agoAgain, you're assuming that ordinary people had some way to easily "keep a copy for themselves". This was emphatically not the case. This data was not digital. It only existed as a set of magnetic tapes in an unusual format: 1" magnetic tapes containing application-specific analog data. The number of institutions that would have been capable of copying and storing this data would have been small; it's improbable that any individual, "happy mutant" or otherwise, could have done so at the time. The notion that any sort of data is easy to copy and store is a modern concept. It was usually not the case in the past.