It is a mystery to me why (in your case) playback equipment not even half-a-century old is not kept in good working order although an archive of recordings playable only on such equipment exists. Maintenance of such equipment and, where necessary, construction of interfaces to connect it to the currently used machinery, so that every bit of data can be retrieved from its original format whenever needed, would probably cost but a small fraction of constantly re-transferring (and thereby involuntarily degrading) the recorded data to new formats every other year or so.

It is VERY hard to keep 60′s era analog instrumentation tape drives in operation for 45 years. We are going to have to replace all of the capacitors and probably all of the germanium transistors with modern versions. I don’t think that most people today realize how touchy and maintanence intensive that era’s equipment is. Also, in this case, there is only one remaining read head company in the world that refurbishes the helical scan air bearing rotating heads. When they quit the business in a year or so the cost for refurbishment goes up by two orders of magnitude.

Just about all complex equipment has quirks that the experienced engineers that kept these things working knew by heart but never transferred that data from their brains to paper. We have a retired Ampex engineer working with us but our equipment is unique (was used for a lot of classified work in the 60′s) and the amount of information on this equipment is extremely limited.

John Christy got his start in the climate business when figuring out how to download satellite temperature data from 1979 (he did this in 88 and 89 when I worked down the hall from him) that was already almost impossible to download. A lot of those data set digital formats are peculiar to the machine that originally recorded them and these things get tossed almost as soon as the contract is ended.

I worked on a project in the 80′s to digitize the drawings from the B1- Bomber (5 million drawings) and Rockwell bid the job at almost a quarter of a billion dollars.

Bottom line is that this is NOT easy or cheap. It is way better to update every few years the original data sets rather than waiting a few decades.

“It is a mystery to me why (in your case) playback equipment not even half-a-century old is not kept in good working order although an archive of recordings playable only on such equipment exists.”

I don’t believe it’s such a mystery because these things require someone to budget for it and for that budget submit to make it up to the funding approval folks. Unless you have a specific tangible need like Dennis, it’s too hard to make a compelling case. Especially when the case may involve a statement like; “we don’t know exactly what we might need it for, but it’s good practice so that we’ll be ready quickly if the need does arise.”

Never mind that that the cost is probably higher than what the approvers notion of a reasonable cost is. I can just see the thoughts in their heads: $500 for some old equipment off e-Bay, 3 days to get it working, 2 days to get the old data, 3 days to run it through the free internet download data conversion application, 2 days to wrap it up and 2 days to give us a brief.
That’s 2 people at 12 days @ $120/hr, $500 equipment. That’s about $23.5K How hard is this?

Request approved, but just do this within your existing budget.

Of course it is practically impossible to transfer and re-transfer a steadily growing amount of data to every new generation of storage media that comes along. But then, this is not the way to do it anyhow IMHO. I come from a quite different area of expertise (digitization and restoration of early audio and video recordings), but the problems are similar: To get the best possible results, one always needs to go back to the first-generation “data” (whether digital or analog); each transfer generation invariably accumulates errors of some kind and is never truly better than its source. New methods of signal processing can often extract detail from original sources not even thought to be there even some years ago. All too often however original sources have however been thrown out by archives long ago in favor of “modernized”, adjusted transfers that lack much of the finer details.

It is a mystery to me why (in your case) playback equipment not even half-a-century old is not kept in good working order although an archive of recordings playable only on such equipment exists. Maintenance of such equipment and, where necessary, construction of interfaces to connect it to the currently used machinery, so that every bit of data can be retrieved from its original format whenever needed, would probably cost but a small fraction of constantly re-transferring (and thereby involuntarily degrading) the recorded data to new formats every other year or so.