Worst “Tell-tale Heart” re-make EVAH.
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Someone watched “Hardware” too many times.
I watched it once (1990 movie?), and all I barely remember is the fridge scene. What a poorly-designed IR system! (Just what I’d expect from people who didn’t water-proof a combat robot.)
Were any of the other infractions detrimental to other workers? If they were you could have argued that the union wasn’t doing their job to protect all of their members.
You would have also needed to be a union member too if you were to make that argument though.
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The old 9-track tapes were literally nine bits (eight data, 1 parity) side to side across the tape. You took a sight glass, which was a ring containing two thin pieces of of glass with extremely magnetically sensitive dust between them, and put it on the tape. Tap the side of the ring a few times, and neat rows of square blocks appear, which you can then transcribe to a piece of graph paper. Move the glass a quarter inch forward, tap, repeat. Eventually you’d manually convert the binary to bytecodes, then figure out if it’s data or text, &etc. by hand.
This was no longer possible (or at least I never managed to do it successfully) once the tape capacities jumped from 1600 bytes per inch to 6250. But with the old 800 bpi tapes, I could take a tape too fragile or too shredded to survive the drive, or too covered with mildew and gunk for the drive heads to survive, and hand-transcribe it by eye, then hand-decode what it meant sort of like doing a crossword puzzle.
Of course you had to understand things at the level of twos-complement & pre-IEEE standard floating point binary representation, but in those days you had to know that stuff anyway, if you were going to do Real Computer Programming® This was in the days of manually mapped task building, before the virtual address extension and virtual memory (an era I personally am glad has passed away!)
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Neat! I’d love to see video of that.,
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Me three. Or, rather, me 00000011.
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Sadly, I can find no videos or even stills of the process. I was taught how to do it by Leonard Rose Senior, I think… or somebody else from the age of the dynasoars, I’m not really 100% certain.
“Figure 1” in this old Wang document gives you a pretty good idea of the physical organization of the tapes. With a shredded tape, you would start by mounting the tape segment you wanted to read on a desk or drafting table with scotch tape, piecing the fragments together like potsherds.
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LOL; No, I read The Register frequently, but don’t post there
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Medievalist. I don’t know you, but I love you.
Reading this just makes me happy. Maybe it is because I started off my career with people doing Real Computer Programming® and was in awe of it. So very very complex.
I didn’t have the training nor the mental discipline to code and I respected the people who did. I think they liked that I understood that what they did was complex and not “a non-trivial matter”
I was such a fan of the early space age and it was depressing that I didn’t have the math, science or computer skills to be involved directly. But I did what I could to help. When I went to Space Camp I bought as much merchandise as I could 
I think about how we have not only advanced on “the shoulders of giants” but on the backs of 1,000s of people like you.
Thanks for the boost.
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Probably do it with a camera these days. Copy your bytes into a file and run strings on the result.
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Careful: That’s how horror/scifi novels begin.
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Could this be the part where conspiracy theory kooks claim that the tapes corroborating alien visitations were intentionally hidden in that garage, that the NSA planted the destructive mold, and the redacted name was Werner Von Braun?
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The world has too much schadenfreude and not enough firgun and mudita, so thank you right back!
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I’m so glad you saw this. And you taught me two new words! Today is a good day.
Thanks for giving me a way to articulate being happy for the success of others and to add to the positiveness of the world.
I watched Valerian this weekend. The opening scene was my favorite part of the movie. It was hopeful about our ability to work together in space.
I think that is also why I’m a big Star Trek fan. I LIKE stories where humans and aliens work together to create things. I love stories where we figure out a solution to a problem that doesn’t involve blowing stuff up.
Funny thing about Space Camp, it turns out it was Wernher Von Braun’s idea! He wanted kids to have a place to learn about rockets. I appreciated that, even though I went to Space Camp as an adult!
LLAP,
Spocko
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I was a systems programmer on the IBM systems, which really did involve
quite a lot of actual programming for the operating system; with the Cray
and other UNIX machines, it was mostly get a tape, install a tape, come in
and fix a downed machine at 2AM. Much less fun than building an entire
automation system across VM/XA and MVS.
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