Originally published at: NARA recovers famed 1982 Grace Hopper lecture recorded on obsolete media format - Boing Boing
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The NSA didn’t have the hardware, but NARA did.
While NSA did not possess the equipment required to access the footage from the media format in which it was preserved, NSA deemed the footage to be of significant public interest and requested assistance from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to retrieve the footage. NARA’s Special Media Department was able to retrieve the footage contained on two 1’ AMPEX tapes and transferred the footage to NSA to be reviewed for public release.
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shouldn’t surprise anyone that that’s the case…
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I still know a guy who sealed 2 of those ampex decks in plastic and hid them away for future use at CNN. He broke one out in the late 90s because some archival beta tapes of older stuff didn’t have a good transfer.
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Shouldn’t that be 1” Ampex, instead of 1’ (1 foot, 30.5 cm wide tapes) Ampex?
Asking for a friend…
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Came here to pick that exact nit.
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“discussing some of the potential future challenges of protecting information.”
The irony.
Also, remember the time NASA (or maybe NOAA) lost a bunch of climate data because of a shortage of … whale oil?
Good times.
(Also me, I REALLY need to convert those .FLV files I saved)
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People from this side of the Atlantic have no idea about your imperial/customary/naval/NSA/whatever units.
Measure it in Pomeranians or corgis like an ordinary person so we can all understand.
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Hard to believe Alec over at Technology Connections doesn’t have two AMPEX recorders hanging around under the CED player right next to the World’s best toaster.
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Hold on, the standard unit of length is the brontosaurus - though the double decker bus is still widely accepted but has been deprecated since the whole bendy bus debacle.
Height is done differently (for simplicity you understand) and is the Nelson Column.
Area is Waleses (the country not the royals).
Volume is Olympic-sized swimming pools, though not the one in Paris because that was shallow - but what do you expect from the French? And if anyone says a simple, rational system of measurement it will be off to the firkin with you!
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Given the timeframe, I thought 3/4" u-matic cassette would have been in widespread use, but this seems to be the Type C reel-to-reel the preceded it. It was a helical scan and the first format to offer freeze-frame and variable-speed playback,
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Sorry, but over here we’re on the banana system.
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Just look!
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We call them freedom units and can be easily converted by multiplying the base number by .6 Bald Eagles.
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NSA didn’t want to get off their collective asses and find someone who could play those tapes until Ravintsky kept pestering them about it: With a little help from the National Archives, NSA finally releases Grace Hopper lecture. Watch it here. • MuckRock
“Uh, we have a bunch of tapes but we don’t know what’s on them”
“Oh here it is, but we don’t have a machine that will play it”
“So it turns out NARA does this kind of thing all the time”
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I thought that was a radiological measure 
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That is astoundingly good quality for 1982. 1" Ampex Type-C VTR remained the broadcast standard for many years for a reason.
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Given this is Grace Hopper, the proper measure would be 85 picoseconds.
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I saw this when it aired originally. I was a brand-new minted COBOL-Coding Systems Engineer at EDS, and this woman became my hero instantly!
Edited for superfluous “I”
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0.4 hamsters (lateral cross section). Or 0.35 if they just ate, of course.
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