For years I have heard stories about the 1960 U.S. Census. The stories vary a bit on each telling but usually say something like, "the 1960 U.S. Census was stored on a computer media for which there no longer was any equipment to read it. The census data has been lost because of the change in technology."
I always doubted that story. I was just starting my career in computers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I remember well the tape drives of that era. I spent many hours repairing those half-inch and three-quarter inch tape drives! I think I still could disassemble and reassemble a Honeywell 204B-9 half-inch tape drive while blindfolded. That device was a maze of electronics (without integrated circuits), disk brakes, a big vacuum pump, and numerous solenoids. Also, it weighed eight hundred pounds.
Since I am familiar with both the old and the new technologies involved, I decided to investigate the 1960 census story.
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