Ralph Corderoy <ralph(a)inputplus.co.uk> writes today: Thanks for uncovering that! I'll add links to it shortly in all of the Bell Labs journal family bibliography files. I prepared the family's BibTeX bibliographies in December 2010, according to my revision history logs, and e-mail archives of exchanges with a Bell Labs researcher. At that time, I had access to the full collection of PDFs, but out of concern for local disk space, and the (now mistaken) belief that they would continue to be available at Bell Labs/Lucent, I did not mirror them to Utah. I made the same mistake with the two IBM journals whose archives disappeared behind the IEEE pay wall. Sigh... ---------------------------------------- P.S. In 1990, we filled a dumpster with 9-track tapes that we had to abandon because of our move to new hardware that lacked such a drive, and because our new disk system had insufficent disk space to preserve their contents. I have since regretted that decision many times, because a lot of stuff was lost forever. The maximum capacity of 6250-bpi 9-track tapes was about 100MB to 170MB. A thousand such tapes would have needed just 100GB to 170GB, an amount of space that I can now buy in Utah for about US$4 (based on a local store offering of $94 for a 4TB USB-3 attached disk about the size of a paperback thriller). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I remember in 1990 we got our first 1Gig drive, I paid $1000 for it. ($1/MB). One of the sales guys I worked with had a unit of storage called the “Costco Terabyte.” How much one terabyte of storage costs at Costco. When we started tracking it, it was around $5000. It was down about $40 last I checked. From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Henry Bent Sent: Friday, November 24, 2017 1:17 PM To: Nelson H. F. Beebe Cc: TUHS main list Subject: Re: [TUHS] Spell - was tmac: Move macro diagnostics away from `quotes' On 24 November 2017 at 13:06, Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe(a)math.utah.edu> wrote: P.S. In 1990, we filled a dumpster with 9-track tapes that we had to abandon because of our move to new hardware that lacked such a drive, and because our new disk system had insufficent disk space to preserve their contents. I have since regretted that decision many times, because a lot of stuff was lost forever. The maximum capacity of 6250-bpi 9-track tapes was about 100MB to 170MB. A thousand such tapes would have needed just 100GB to 170GB, an amount of space that I can now buy in Utah for about US$4 (based on a local store offering of $94 for a 4TB USB-3 attached disk about the size of a paperback thriller). Sure, but how much would 170GB of storage have cost in 1990? And what would have been the cost to mirror it, or to back it up on to a more modern tape format? Was that data really worth tens of thousands of dollars? -Henry

The Disks that stick in my memory where 4Gb scsi drives from IBM, I forget the model number - this would have been 1996-ish. They had been lubricated with the wrong viscosity oil. Over time the oil would flood out over the top platter, though this didn't seem to stop them working. However when you powered them down they would not spin up again as the heads would stick to the platter. They also made a horrific chattering noise as they tried to start. The IBM service engineer's solution was to thump them with the but of his screwdriver and they would (usually) spin up! We swapped them out pretty sharpish after that. We had dozens attached to a pair of SGI Origins running back-to-back. Thankfully most disks lived long enough to be copied and those that didn't proved the worth of the DLT tapes. -Steve

On 11/24/2017 12:01 PM, Ralph Corderoy wrote: Don't rely on outside entities to archive content. Mirror it, and put it up yourself. If anyone needs free hosting, let me know. art k.