NASA is celebrating the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 moon walk today by releasing restored video of the historic footage broadcast around the world on July 16, 1969.
Part of the back story is very sad. Turns out that what we (those of us over 40) saw that night was a poor-quality TV broadcast translation of the actual video. The better-quality originals were stored on tapes until the early 1980’s, when they were copied over because NASA needed to reuse their tapes.
That’s right – we lost this incredible piece of history forever due to a storage shortage. 200,000 computer tapes were written over by NASA from 1981 to 1983.
Some things never change. The situation is eerily familiar to IT managers everywhere: growing data, shrinking budgets.
I think we’d make better choices today. But that’s hindsight.
What are you deleting today?
Photo source: Associated Press
Leave A Comment