Big Baggy Shorts: Recovering Data From Canada’s Telidon System

Interesting paper on recovering data from a PDP-11 system that ran early Videotex creation tools. It was much harder than expected, by the looks of things.

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An interesting read indeed - how different videotext might have been…

Also interesting that the intended plain-text archival format from back in the day was more difficult to use for recovery than the undocumented binary backups.

the challenging experiences we had in resurrecting those data after a mere 40 years suggest that future-proofing the reams of digital data we produce now for future scholars may demand better documentation and more robust digital formats.