https://hackaday.com/2024/07/13/the-nsa-is-defeated-by-a-1950s-tape-recorder-can-you-help-them/ Skip to content Logo Hackaday Primary Menu * Home * Blog * Hackaday.io * Tindie * Hackaday Prize * Submit * About * Search for: [ ] [Search] July 13, 2024 The NSA Is Defeated By A 1950s Tape Recorder. Can You Help Them? 25 Comments * by: Jenny List July 13, 2024 * * * * * Title: [The NSA Is Defeated ] Copy Short Link: [https://hackaday.com] Copy [hopper-tap] One of the towering figures in the evolution of computer science was Grace Hopper, an American mathematician, academic, and Naval reservist, whose work gave us the first programming languages, compilers, and much more. Sadly she passed away in 1992, so her wisdom hasn't directly informed the Internet Age in the manner of some of her surviving contemporaries. During her life she gave many lectures though, and as [Michael Ravnitzky] discovered, one of them was recorded on video tape and resides in the archives of America's National Security Agency. With the title "Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People", it was the subject of a Freedom Of Information request. This in turn was denied, on the grounds that "Without being able to view the tapes, NSA has no way to verify their responsiveness". In short, the recording lies on Ampex 1'' reel-to-reel video tape, which the NSA claims no longer to be able to read. It's fairly obvious from that response that the agency has no desire to oblige, and we'd be very surprised to find that they keep a working Ampex video system to hand on the off-chance that a passing researcher might ask for an archive tape. But at the same time it's also obvious that a lecture from Rear Admiral Hopper is an artifact of international importance that should be preserved and available for study. It's an interesting thought exercise to guess how many phone calls Hackaday would have to make to secure access to a working Ampex video recorder, and since we think for us that number would be surprisingly low it's likely the NSA know exactly who to call if they needed that tape viewed in a hurry. We don't have influence over secretive government agencies, but if we did we'd be calling shame on them at this point. If you're curious about Grace Hopper, we've talked about her work here in the past. Thanks [F4GRX] for the tip. Ampex image: Telecineguy., Public domain. * [share_face] * [share_twit] * [share_in] * [share_mail] Posted in HistoryTagged ampex, grace hopper, nsa, video tape Post navigation - It's Not Unsual To Love Hacking Docker-Powered Remote Gaming With Games On Whales - 25 thoughts on "The NSA Is Defeated By A 1950s Tape Recorder. Can You Help Them?" 1. midori says: July 13, 2024 at 10:11 am The NSA should give NASA a call. Report comment Reply 1. Gunplumber says: July 13, 2024 at 1:30 pm Or Techmoan Report comment Reply 1. Aaron says: July 13, 2024 at 3:26 pm Or This Does Not Compute Report comment Reply 2. Rick says: July 13, 2024 at 10:16 am It's more likely they know exactly whats on that tape and don't want to share, or have lost it and don't want to admit it. Report comment Reply 1. 0xdeadbeef says: July 13, 2024 at 12:29 pm No, what's more likely is that they don't want to expend the resources (namely, time and money, some of which goes to paying those employees involved) tracking down the equipment, loading the tape, watching it from start to finish to ensure nothing needs to be redacted, and then either releasing it or digitizing it to be released. The people involved in handling the FOIA request likely have little idea of just how important that lecture is for the modern world, so this simply comes down to doing what's easiest: denying the request. Fortunately, with numerous publications picking this up, the latest being HaD, there's a chance someone at the agency will reconsider. Report comment Reply 2. Agammamon says: July 13, 2024 at 1:58 pm Realistically, anything Hopper was talking about back then is obsolete or irrelevant now. In this case it's less 'secrecy' and more 'we're not spending the effort on historical research'. Report comment Reply 3. Doctor Duck says: July 13, 2024 at 10:55 am Ampex 1'' : needs more detail. Type C? Report comment Reply 4. SteveS says: July 13, 2024 at 11:02 am There were a few generations of 1'' video tape. By 1982, "Type C" would have been ubiquitous, as it was widely adopted as the US broadcast standard in the late 70's. Like all NTSC formats, it's been functionally obsolete for a decade or more, but the VTR's were built like tanks, and there are still plenty of machines out there doing archival work. One assumes that an organization like the NSA could access one, or at the very least, Google "tape transfer" -- if they were so inclined. True, there are a couple of other 1'' formats. Type A was a black and white industrial format from the early 70's. It was largely superseded by 3/4'' u-matic, but there are still machines out there. Type B was effectively the European competitor to Type C, in sort of a professional version of the VHS versus Betamax fight, the European bloc led by Bosch lost to the US/Japanese bloc led by Ampex and Sony. One interesting fact is that ALL of the non-digital helical formats used analog audio tracks, and in the 80's and 90's many post houses modified _audio_ reel-to-reel machines to work with the fixed audio tracks (the idea being that dedicated audio transports produced a superior result with less wow and flutter), so even if you can't read the _video_ format any more, it should be straightforward to pull the audio, even from seriously degraded tape Report comment Reply 5. Antron Argaiv says: July 13, 2024 at 11:21 am Rear Admiral Grace Hopper spoke at a seminar when I was in grad school. At the time, she was acting as a part-time ambassador for DEC, and one of the profs (Bob Glorioso) got her to come and talk. This would have been 1977. It was a pretty standard speech, one I'm sure she gave quite often. She handed out "nanoseconds", lengths of telephone cable, cut to around a foot, the distance she said that electricity travels in a nanosecond (IIRC, it's actually more like 19''). She was involved with a lot of the early computers, and she said that the piece of wire helped her to remember to consider physical effects when doing designs. She was quite old, but the way she spoke and carried herself made it clear that this was someone who did not suffer fools gladly. I did not speak with her, I got the feeling that she was already tired, and did not need or want any "meet and greet" time. Still, a memorable meeting. Report comment Reply 1. Paul says: July 13, 2024 at 11:39 am In free space, light travels very close to a foot per nanosecond (300 mm, 11.8 inches). In "telephone cable" or generic twisted pair, it's quite a bit slower: more like 195 mm/ns. Report comment Reply 2. Jon Fleig says: July 13, 2024 at 3:17 pm Adm. Hopper gave pretty much the same presentation at the University of Florida's ACM chapter, I think in '77 or' 78. I recall her nanosecond wire being 9 inches long. Report comment Reply 6. Antron Argaiv says: July 13, 2024 at 11:22 am I would be surprised if someone at either the Smithsonian or Library of Congress didn't have the ability to round up one of those recorders. Report comment Reply 1. TimT says: July 13, 2024 at 12:07 pm This! The Smithsonian has a department that collects obsolete media devices specifically so they can play back and archive things they may acquire in their collection. Report comment Reply 2. Mark Topham says: July 13, 2024 at 1:49 pm To be handed off from the NSA would require that it be viewed and categorized, a process which takes time and resources. If they could do so now they would, but they can't just release it as-is without review. But, they aren't compelled to line up the equipment they don't have to do that. You want it done? Convince the presidency to sign an executive order demanding they go through the required steps. They cannot however violate those steps just because you want them to. Report comment Reply 7. Chris Maple says: July 13, 2024 at 12:02 pm http://www.thetransferlab.com for $250/hr. Report comment Reply 8. SayWhat? says: July 13, 2024 at 12:40 pm Our government is no longer OUR government. Report comment Reply 9. Mystick says: July 13, 2024 at 1:08 pm All that stuff was digitized in the 80's. They don't have old reels lying around anymore. Report comment Reply 1. BrightBlueJim says: July 13, 2024 at 1:19 pm Okay great. Now all we need is a 9-track or disk pack drive. Report comment Reply 10. David says: July 13, 2024 at 1:14 pm Suppose this were 2000 years from now and the specific underlying technology was completely lost, but science was at least (back?) to 21st-century levels and they knew that the data was recorded magnetically. Archeologists would be working hard to at least measure the magnetism on the tape and, from there, figure out what meaning it had. Now back to a hypothetical version of 2024 where the tape format has been lost to history. I would be shocked if some three-letter-agency didn't have a generic device to read the magnetism on magnetic tape. Read the raw magnetic data, publish it to the world, and see if anyone is interested enough to give it meaning. Now back to the real world: Just find yourself a tape-reader or pay a service to recover the lecture. It's not hard, folks. Expensive, maybe, but not hard. I mention the 2nd option because there are probably some important things out there that were recorded on experimental devices or in an experimental format that has been lost to history. That alone is not an excuse for not trying to read the raw information. "It's too expensive" might be a good reason, but "it's impossible" is not. Report comment Reply 1. BrightBlueJim says: July 13, 2024 at 1:23 pm Tell that to anybody who had anything archived on Ampex 456 tape. Report comment Reply 1. David says: July 13, 2024 at 1:43 pm In my post above, I am assuming the media hasn't physically degraded beyond readability. In the case of Ampex 456, a quick interweb search mentions "sticky shed syndrome" that will cause the tape to be ruined if you try to play or rewind it. The interweb also mentions a possible work-around: baking the tape. It's the internet, so your mileage - or since this is tape should I say footage - may vary. Report comment Reply 11. Agammamon says: July 13, 2024 at 1:56 pm It's the NSA - they probably have the lecture recorded on some other format because they were bugging the lecture hall. Screw 'em. Report comment Reply 12. jbx says: July 13, 2024 at 2:54 pm While they are at it, could they also have a look at the ZIP-Drive, the only storage device that required Xanax to work... Report comment Reply 13. Jon H says: July 13, 2024 at 3:08 pm I doubt the lecture is of anything more than historical interest for Hopper completists. Ravnitzky is over-hyping it to get attention. With all due respect to Hopper's accomplishments, there's no reason to think a Hopper lecture in 1982 at age 76 would be a "landmark". 1942, yes, 1952, yes, 1962, yes, 1982, not so much. Report comment Reply 14. Reg says: July 13, 2024 at 3:41 pm The oil industry used a LOT of 9 track tape. Amoco rented many blocks of basements in Tulsa to store them. They were regularly rewound to prevent print through from layer to layer. I reprocessed quite a few late '60s 9 track tapes in 1982. Only problem I encountered was obscure, non-standard data formats which required parsing hexadecimal dumps to determine the data format. A second major issue is "stiction". This is the oxide layer coming off the tape. Baking is used in an attempt to prevent that but it is not always successful. In the late '80s I copied all the user data from a MicroVAX II onto a NEW TK-50 and after verifying the tape, deleted all the user data so I could install the new release of VMS from disk rather spend hours while the TK-50 shoe shined through the tape. When I finished and tried to restore the user data, the read failed within a few minutes. DEC was unable to recover the data. Fortunately I only lost a week's worth of work. Old tape is a crap shoot at best and expensive. However, if handled appropriately it CAN be read, though using the machine that recorded it might destroy it. So a method that did not require physical contact with the tape would be advisable. Doubtless uncommon and expensive, but if it was a tape from a 1950's nuclear test I'm certain that it could and would be done if requested. Report comment Reply Leave a ReplyCancel reply Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy) This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. 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