Just out of curiosity..

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Fri Aug 24 07:26:34 2001

At 11:44 PM 8/23/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Just out of curiosity, how often do y'all get 'data retreival' requests,
>where some schmuck tosses you a tape from 1980 and needs the
>data?

My Terak page has generated a few. One nice request from
a university came with the promise of sending me some old
Terak hardware for my trouble. If I'd charged them my usual
consulting rates, that hardware cost me a fair chunk of cash,
but I didn't look at it that way.

This ties back to someone's recent question about making a
living with old hardware and software. There are people making
a living at that. Unfortunately, I'd guess it was one of
those careers you inherit from your earlier work, as opposed
to being able to open up a new shop for data conversion.

You'd need an extensive collection of working systems
and/or working I/O devices for that, and you could spend a
lot of time developing specialized hardware and software
for decoding marginal media. For example, there's a list
member who recovers old tapes by digitizing the tracks
and performing software-based recovery techniques.

- John
Received on Fri Aug 24 2001 - 07:26:34 BST