Houston. We lost the pictures.

[adrian]

But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.

A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.

Complete article @ the source

Maybe they should start using google to find them LOL

[WindwardOahuRN]

Re: Houston. We lost the pictures.

Sorry. We're all worried about Beachboy....

[pzarquon]

Re: Houston. We lost the pictures.

The decay of older archival media is a big deal. Even just within the relatively narrow universe of Hollywood and old films, they're decaying faster than they can be transferred to a newer format. It's terrible to think of all the great stuff that's lost forever. And, of course, the movie industry's issues in this area pale in comparison to what the Library of Congress and other scientific and historical archives are facing.

The volume of information is so great, that even if it were possible to move a whole collection to a "new" format, that new format would be outdated before they were done with the first pass.

Now that everyday dorks like me are creating massive amounts of media, the chances that a decent portion of it will survive several generations are pretty slim. Even though storage methods and costs are improving exponentially, they're not doing so at a rate that would accommodate everything out there today -- let alone five years from now.

It's a pity that no one can, say, "save the whole internet for posterity." Sure you have Google's massive index and cache, or the Internet Archive's collection, but that's just a tiny fragment of what's really out there. And who's to say today what things we're going to really wish we still had on hand fifty years from now?

[WindwardOahuRN]

Re: Houston. We lost the pictures.

Years ago, when going through stuff in an attic, we came old film footage that showed my grandparents at the 1937 World's Fair in NY. We held it up to the light and it disintegrated in our hands.

Sad.