(Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 1999-12)
Bolmer, S. Thompson; DuBois, David L.; Hoskins, Hartley; Sass, Warren J.
The WHO! Marine Seismic community had about two thousand 9-track
magnetic tapes in storage. The data stored were from marine experiments
dating from the 1970's to 1990 and from computer models. The experiments
included observations made with seafloor instruments and sondes in
boreholes. These tapes were created on Digital Equipment Corporation
(DEC) V AXNMS and other older computer operating systems. The tapes
needed to be read and put into a format that contemporary UNIX operating
systems could read. This report documents the logistics of transcribing this
information onto CD-ROM.
A search was made to find the best way to read and rewrite these 9-track
tapes to new media that would have a longer shelflife and be readable on
today's UNIX variants. As a result of this search, an outside company was
hired to do these conversions. The tapes that were readable from this first
group of 381 tapes selected for transcription are now on twenty-five CDROMs.
