I love librarians / archivists

[mundens]

This lady is, and those that supported her are, in my eyes, heroes.

She had no idea what she was letting herself in for. The full collection of Lunar Orbiter data amounted to 2,500 tapes. Assembled on pallets, they constituted an imposing monolith 10 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6 feet high.

The mountain of tapes was just part of Evans' new burden.

There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton. full story

Comments

[lobelet.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh! That's a spine tingling story.

I grew up with NASA. I was in Wales, in a caravan, revising for a university exam, when Apollo 13 drove everything else out of my head (I got a mediocre result, but I don't care -- some things are more important than exams). Those images were part of my life -- in England the moon landing in 1969 took place in the early hours of the morning. My mother and I stayed up to watch it (my father went to bed; he had no soul). When Neil Armstrong said those famous words, my mother and I both burst into tears.

Some things are sacred.