source for cheap TK50s?

From: Mike Ford <mikeford_at_socal.rr.com>
Date: Wed Jun 14 04:50:48 2000

>> > Yes. VERY IMPORTANT! Yet almost noone bothers to do it. NASA has tons
>> > (literally) of data that is decaying into worthlessness, because they
>> > didn't have viable plans for long-term retention.
>>
>> Is this really true or just another legend? I ask because many people
>> also say that the old data the Census Bereau keeps in digital form is also
>> decaying and partially unreadable.
>>
>
>The NASA one is definitely true. I was at a NASA workshop
>sometime around 1990 where this was discussed. One of the
>problems we discussed was actually using the data before it
>became unreadable. At that point it was estimated that only
>5% of the data collected by NASA was ever read. There were
>several reasons stated for this:
>
>1) NASA is very conservative in data collection, they always
> collected more data than they need. The main reason for
> this is the cost of sending out a probe, you don't want
> to miss something important and have send another one.

This is a foggy memory from the a trip to Houston, but isn't a lot of older
data just printed text on paper?
Received on Wed Jun 14 2000 - 04:50:48 BST