In This Episode: We know our ancient cultural history because of stone tablets and paper scrolls. We know more recent history because it was printed in books. But with the Internet, where is our history? There are millions of web sites, but if the owner dies and stops paying the bills for their server, it’s shut down, the domain name expires, and all of its knowledge can instantly be lost forever. Someone is trying to do something about that.

Tweet
Jump to Transcript
How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes
Show Notes

* To help support Uncommon Sense, see the Patron’s Page, or the form in the sidebar
* This is the first of two parts on rescuing human history. The episodes don’t really need to be consumed in order.
* Kevin Savetz is one of the hosts of ANTIC, the Atari 7-bit Podcast, with hundreds of interviews with pioneers of early personal computing. You can also search or look through the Internet Archive’s Atari archive.
* For an example of an eclectic collection of items donated to the Internet Archive, consider Ted Nelson’s Junk Mail Cartons — thousands of items that one guy collected and tossed into boxes in “the early days of computing.”
* A photo of 9-track tape drives is below in the transcript, as is a screenshot of this web site from decades ago.

Transcript
Welcome to Uncommon Sense. I’m Randy Cassingham.
This is the first of a two-part series on another example of Uncommon Sense taken to the extreme to solve the problem of preserving knowledge — and thank goodness for that.
Digital information is much more fragile than books. Digital disks don’t last for hundreds of years like books can: they not only crash, but as technology advances we actually lose the ability to read them. If you found a floppy disk from your own early computer days, would you be able to read it to see what’s on it? Are you sure? You have a working computer with a working floppy drive? And if so, is it the right kind? There are 8-inch, 5-1/4-inch, and 3.5-inch floppies. Early drives were single-sided, then double-sided. Then “single-density” and later “double-density” — technology advances. And then there were formats: a CP/M machine from one manufacturer recorded its data differently than other CP/M machines, let alone IBM-PC clones.
Before that, there were large spools of tape. IBM put out giant drives to read and write data on 7-track tapes. Which didn’t last long, because starting in 1964 there were 9-track tapes. Those spools of tape were 10-1/2 inches in diameter to hold 1,200 to 2,400 feet of half-inch tape, and get this, capacity was measured not in terabytes or gigabytes, but rather in bytes per inch; 1,600 bytes per inch. A 2,400-foot tape could hold up to 42 megabytes of data.
Why 9 tracks? There were 8 tracks to record the bits, since 8 bits make a byte, plus one extra “parity” — or error checking — bit. The IBM Model 2401 tape drive and its successors were used in production environments for a remarkable 30 years, though as time went by the bit-per-inch rating increased, bringing a tape’s capacity up to a maximum of 170 megabytes.