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.
The NSA should give NASA a call.
Or Techmoan
Or This Does Not Compute
Or Curiousmarc
Compewt-ah says no
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.
Not lost. There is an image of of the actual tape with the corresponding lable.
Per my experience as a former US government employee, I know that there are machines that could read this tape within the various DOD T&E organizations.
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.
“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”
The person requesting the FOIA has to pay for the recovery effort with different policies within different agencies. They notify you of the estimated cost before proceeding.
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’.
It’s old enough it wouldn’t be SECRET.
It’s about as obsolete or irrelevant as the associative property of addition and multiplication, or the concept of liberty.
The recording is from the 1980s.
She was doing hot new technologies in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1980s she would have been talking about more timeless things. About HOW to invent the future. About how to make an impact on the world.
That video will likely be lost if it’s not digitized soon. The tape is already old enough that it may only be playable once or twice.
They didn’t lose it, they took pictures of the tapes and gave those to the FOIA requested.
Ampex 1″ : needs more detail. Type C?
Can you tell from the pictures? https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24796009-foia-request-118587-grace-hopper-lecture#document/p3
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
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.
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.
That would be 7.7 inches per nanosecond for earth people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just borrow the one from the president’s living room.
http://www.thetransferlab.com for $250/hr.
Nice dodge to avoid a FOIA.
“I’m sorry we can’t give you the information because we can’t read it.”
“Um, you just have to open the book.”
“Don’t tell us how to do our job!”
All that stuff was digitized in the 80’s. They don’t have old reels lying around anymore.
Okay great. Now all we need is a 9-track or disk pack drive.
No they do have it laying around, they sent the FOIA requester pictures of it.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24796009-foia-request-118587-grace-hopper-lecture#document/p3
Broadcast stations have “old equipment” storage rooms. And broadcast engineers save stuff.
The recorder is out there (possibly in need of replacement friction rollers)
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.
Tell that to anybody who had anything archived on Ampex 456 tape.
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.
Baking the tape is the tactic the archivists at UNC Libraries prefer. These are the same folks who can get the sound off of a record melted into a taco.
haha
“Suppose this were 2000 years from now”
The world has been deprecating and capabilities/possibilities degrading desmarting degrowthing ever since the 1970’s, so no, I don’t think there will be any civilized people 2000 years from now, much less a couple of hundred years from now.
Or possibly just 8 months from now. :/
It’s the NSA – they probably have the lecture recorded on some other format because they were bugging the lecture hall.
Screw ’em.
While they are at it, could they also have a look at the ZIP-Drive, the only storage device that required Xanax to work…
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.
No 1972? Must be redacted. What could the secret be? You’re not saying she worked with aliens in 1972 but it’s aliens isn’t it?
Sad I have to say this but I kind of think I do. J/K
Looks like she gave a lecture with the same title a year later and the Computer History Museum has a copy. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102781162
And another with the same title at the Naval Institute in 1984. There’s a link to their transcript or recording in this article. https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2020/july/navy-needs-problem-first-innovation
And WVU has a copy of the transcript from a Brookhaven National Lab talk with the same title from 1985 listed in their library. https://search.worldcat.org/title/Future-possibilities-data-hardware-software-and-people/oclc/929861490
If any two of those match or are even close to the same, my guess is there’s little incentive for the NSA to put forth the effort to recover their rendition of the talk.
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.
Sir this is a Wendy’s.
FOIA requests are not free. The requester must pay reasonable costs for employee time, blank media, etc. Papers run $3-$5 per page. A DVD is $25+.
The label on the reel sez “Approved for release” so no review/redaction should be needed, just make a copy. Surely the NSA could make a copy for a few hundred $$ if the requester will pay for it. And we’re talkin’ the NSA here. Surely they have the means to do it.
No, they are just being obstinate.
Interesting to note that reading a tape of this age is extremely risky.
Really you want to read it only once, at the highest possible resolution and oversample at 150 kHz so there are multiple parallel data streams that can be digitized later and then de-noised etc once a solid copy is made. Typically with a read head and mechanism from the same era that is thoroughly degaussed so it can’t do damage.
A tape has a tendency for parts of the recording to ‘leak’ over to other parts adjacent to them, this can sometimes be seen on old music recordings.
This is 1″ video tape isn’t it, and in 1982 it’s most likely to be 1″ Type-C? (There were other non-broadcast standards that also used 1″ – but almost all of them used helical recording that recorded tracks diagonally across the tape)
That would require you to capture the diagonal video tracks and the linear, longitudinal, audio tracks (recorded in a similar way to 1/4″ audio tape etc.).
The video is recorded across the 1″ tape width diagonally – not in multiple parallel tracks – using a helical rotating video head (Type A and Type C recorded one track per video field – i.e. two tracks per frame, switching between tracks in vertical blanking, whereas Type-B – which this is very unlikely to be – spread each field across multiple diagonal video tracks, using a smaller head that was rotating more quickly, switching between tracks in horizontal blanking).
It uses FM modulation on the tape to record the video (like almost all analogue video) and uses FM modulation with deviation of 7.06MHz for sync tip, 7.9MHz for blanking, 10MHz for peak white – and will thus have a bandwidth far higher than 150kHz… For NTSC composite recording your baseband NTSC composite signal has a 4.2MHz minimum bandwidth, which means from Carson’s Rule I think you’re looking at around 14MHz on-tape signal bandwidth (2 x (FM deviation+source bandwidth)) – which would require a minimum of 28MS/s sampling. Work being done on digital sampling of off-tape FM video capture and software demodulation and software NTSC / PAL decoding fits with this – as it’s usually done at between 28MS/s and 60MS/s, with 40MS/s where most people are working.
Well you could just find a VHS player
Nsa say they really good at hacking shit….
Or a beta max for the one guy who dick rod Sony back then
I don’t think the Hackaday community needs a working Ampex VTR. There are enough people here who can fix a broken one (that includes me).
Or heck even build a working one from nothing but spare parts and/or homemade replicas of spare parts!
This is almost certainly 1″ Type C. This is ubiquitous enough that I’m restoring two of them in my basement in my spare time.
Yes the tapes should be baked before playing but there should be no surprises here.
The NSA is just being lazy because they don’t have one handy.
There are a number of folks who could digitize these tapes in the Association of Moving Image Archivists Supplier Directory the foremost of which is SPECS BROS., LLC. https://amianet.org/wp-content/uploads/Supplier-Directory-Final-2024.02.pdf
They should coordinate with the Library of Congress. They have one of the largest collections of obsolete tech in the world for exactly this situation.
You’re telling me the nsa can’t buy a real to reel tape player
You can probably find one on eBay in less than 5 minutes
Cost isn’t an issue, they could probably find someone in NASA with one, or another fed who collects old shit.
and it may cost nothing, other than a nice lunch.
And works with other tapes you cant play back but nsa Sure can backdoor a computer but forgot how tape players work
You can find many Ampex reel to reel machine on eBay starting at 1 grand USD for a fully functional one
A grand isn’t pennies to the the budget….