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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA)
AMPX 10.87+2.5%Dec 2 3:59 PM EST
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To: flickerful who wrote (6541)3/26/1999 9:23:00 AM
From: Carl R.  Read Replies (1) of 17679
 
Thanks for that article. A bit of historical information in it explains why the DST is such a hard sell:

The inter-agency project involved migration of the data from the terabit mass storage system(TBM) developed by Ampex Corp., an industry leader in the 1970s. Ampex entered the large scale high performance systems market in the early 1970s with a high speed tape system designed to hold 1 terabit of data and rapidly locate and transfer the data to supercomputing systems. Five systems were sold to the community, principally in the atmospheric modeling arena. The
largest system was installed at NCAR, at a cost of between $1 million and $2 million, over a period of several years; another system was installed at NOAA for archival of TIROS N and future NOAA weather satellite data.

Ampex did not have a market for the product and eventually dropped support. The agencies that had purchased this equipment were left with their only copy of satellite data on this media with no operational backup.

So, Ampex had a leading edge product, and after selling a five of them to the government, dropped support. In the end 11% of the data was lost permanently because there were no surviving tape drives capable of reading the data despite great effort by the government to keep drives running long enough to get all the data transferred.

Not exactly an enviable history. I can see the ad campaign "Trust Ampex - Your data is safe with us, so long as it is convenient for us".

Carl
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