Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!bellcore!tness7!tness1!sugar!ssd
From: ssd@sugar.uu.net (Scott Denham)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: computer follies
Summary: "floating" point data??
Message-ID: <2616@sugar.uu.net>
Date: 12 Sep 88 06:40:31 GMT
References: <5856@ihlpf.ATT.COM> <627@uwovax.uwo.ca> <2045@cuuxb.ATT.COM> <1434@ficc.uu.net>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston, TX
Lines: 21

In article <1434@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
> Well, at a previous job one of the guys slipped and fell coming up the front
> steps while crrying an armful of disk boxes, and dropped about 20 disks in
> the rain. We opened them up and dried them out and sealed them up again, and
> were actually able to read most of them.
> -- 
> Peter da Silva  `-_-'  Ferranti International Controls Corporation.

As a n oilfield service company that acquires massive amounts of data on
magnetic tapes from nasty little boats floating around in nasty sorts of
places, we've seen a lot of "dampened" data.  The two worst cases I have
had to deal with were a whole case of recorded tapes that fell overboard
somewhere off Alaska and were amazingly recovered some weeks later by
some local fishermen.  They had apparently been caught in a net and spent
SEVERAL days in a hold full of fish!! And no hazardous duty pay for having
to clean 'em, either!!!  The second was a tape from a land crew that was
discovered to have a .22 slug embedded about halfway down the reel!. After
a quick clean and splice job, we recovered all but about 2% of the data!
 
Scott Denham 
Western Atlas International