>main Hw decides to buy the farm. I have recently also salvaged a 5 1/2" >floppy drive just in case I want to go really medieval on this...and yes >I have the floppies for a lifetime. I could always go to the Pc-superstore
We also keep OLD hardware around, just in case. There's never enough budget to recopy all our old backups to new media, and our legal department wouldn't even allow it. We try hard to preserve our ability to read any media we've ever used, even if we're not sure, but think maybe someone might have, somewhere. When NASA was planning its missions to Jupiter, it figured out it had some useful data from old Voyager missions. They found the tapes, nicely cataloged. But they were 7-track tapes. Over the years ALL their computers had been upgraded and replaced. Call IBM! "Sorry, Sir, we don't have any customers with maintenance contracts on 7-track tape drives. We don't know where you could read those tapes. Have you tried one of the computer museums?" "Then MAKE us one!" "Umm, we'll get back to you, Sir." "Sir, we're sorry, we can find some old 9-track drives, but we don't have any 7-track heads in any inventory. We haven't made any of those since the 50's." Months later. "Umm, Sir? Are you still interested in a 7-track tape drive? One of our people found one that had fallen behind a rack. We might be able to re-engineer one of the last 9-track drive models to use it. Would you like an RPQ? (Request for Price Quotation)" "Sir, we have your RPQ available. That would be $1,000,000. Would you like us to proceed?" Paul Rogers ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.xprt.net/~pgrogers/ http://www.geocities.com/paulgrogers/ Rogers' Second Law: "Everything you do communicates." (I do not personally endorse any additions after this line. TANSTAAFL :-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2005. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ leaf-user mailing list: leaf-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user Support Request -- http://leaf-project.org/
