Eras don't end in a day, they slowly fade away. Yesterday marked another bittersweet milestone in SETI@home history. We cleaned out the lab. That meant sending the Sun Enterprise series servers that handled SETI@home's databases and web traffic down to the university's Excess and Salvage department. Here they are sitting in the hallway waiting to go.

We had hoped they would end up in a museum somewhere, but unfortunately interest in SETI@home's hardware has faded even faster than the project did.

What we have not (yet) discarded are a couple thousand DLT tapes containing the raw data from the first 6 years of SETI@home. We would like to have the data transferred to a more accessible medium, but we no longer have a functioning DLT IV tape drive, or the funding to pay for a commercial data recovery service. As the group's presence at the Space Science Lab shrinks, those tapes will probably also be discarded as well.

Times change and the world moves on.

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@SETIEric@qoto.org (Mastodon)

Ooooooooo!

Those Sun servers look beautiful!!

There just must be a better home for them than being lost in the junk in a "salvage dump"...

Spread the word?...


Time moves on, progress is made, and some note of the path to progress makes for a good reminder of the progress!

Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Have you considered reaching out to the Archiveteam or homelab reddits? There are several reddits that are hugely involved in do whatever they can to archive and store data. They may be able to assist with the restoration of the data.

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You should consider the possibility of doing an auction for these components if they are to be discarded. I'm sure that there are plenty of people in the BOINC network who would gladly pay for not only the parts but the shipping too. These are great memorabilia items that should not simply be thrown away.

Just logged into m account after a long time to second what m predeccessor has said.

I think especially the DLT-Tapes would make up great collectors items for all the many folks for who this project meant a lot.

So if it's feasible in any way to have them packaged and mailed (this requires work to be done by someone), I think it would be a great idea. Maybe you could set the price for one Tape high enough to not only cover the costs for the person who does the packaging and mailing but to also generate some slight additional fund for the SSL or so.

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Best regards
Jens

I second that. those tapes are probably very precious

No "probably" about it: They definitely are!


Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

That’s a shame - I would think the Computer History Museum in Mountain View CA would want something to commemorate the granddaddy of grid and cloud computing etc?

https://computerhistory.org/

Today I was wondering, why seti@home wasn't working anymore.
So I checked the website...
Man, I'm endlessly sad :(

I really hope, you can find a way to preserve at least the tapes.
If I had money, I would help you out immediately.

regards and best wishes
Harry

Just logged into m account after a long time to second what m predeccessor has said.

I think especially the DLT-Tapes would make up great collectors items for all the many folks for who this project meant a lot.

So if it's feasible in any way to have them packaged and mailed (this requires work to be done by someone), I think it would be a great idea. Maybe you could set the price for one Tape high enough to not only cover the costs for the person who does the packaging and mailing but to also generate some slight additional fund for the SSL or so.

Yes, very good idea
is it possible to do it ?

Eras don't end in a day, they slowly fade away. Yesterday marked another bittersweet milestone in SETI@home history. We cleaned out the lab. That meant sending the Sun Enterprise series servers that handled SETI@home's databases and web traffic down to the university's Excess and Salvage department. Here they are sitting in the hallway waiting to go.

We had hoped they would end up in a museum somewhere, but unfortunately interest in SETI@home's hardware has faded even faster than the project did.

What we have not (yet) discarded are a couple thousand DLT tapes containing the raw data from the first 6 years of SETI@home. We would like to have the data transferred to a more accessible medium, but we no longer have a functioning DLT IV tape drive, or the funding to pay for a commercial data recovery service. As the group's presence at the Space Science Lab shrinks, those tapes will probably also be discarded as well.

Times change and the world moves on.

It's amazing how quickly people give up on an idea when the people running it give up first.

- Jim
- Mentor397

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I very much don't think the people running s@h and Boinc have 'given up' at all.

This is more that times move on, technology and funding move on, and people move on.


For this era of s@h, we now have a lot of behind the scenes back end processing and collation and analysis going on to then publish what has been found or not.

Regardless, some good discoveries and developments have been made.


All good Science!

Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

What kind of long-term storage does the tape medium require? Is it a specialist environment?
I suspect the space-related corporation I work for would happily nursemaid some content for posterity - depending upon the requirements and the liability etc. For instance donate some dry, temperature controlled closet space and inventory reporting and control. I would happily volunteer to take responsibility, manage and long-term support that storage. Those tapes might not be wanted today but in 30 years we all know the interest will surely increase and a museum would probably take over - at least I suspect.

Yes it does require careful control of temperature and humidity, plus protection against extraneous magnetic fields. Most tape manufacturers define a set of storage and handling procedures.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

I think about Seti every day. One of the things that I have wondered about was what happened at Green Bank when the project shut down? Angie.

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I think about Seti every day. One of the things that I have wondered about was what happened at Green Bank when the project shut down? Angie.

Yes part of our regular thoughts

Bill F

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Those 880's bring back some memories for me...

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Green Bank continues to operate. It's major radio telescope and as such SETI is only part of its work. Further SETI@Home was only one the vast number of SETI projects, many of which are still running (but are not using a distributed computing model).

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

SETI work is still going on at Green Bank, via the Breakthrough Listen project. They listened for 6 & 3/4 hours on My 19th, 5 & 1/4 hours on the 20th, and will listen tomorrow, the 21st, for 12 hours. These three sessions were at 21:15 to 04:00 hours UT, 04:00 to 09:15 UT, and 09:15 to 21:15 UT, respectively.

This allowed them access to the entire sky observable from Green Bank at this season of the year, over the course of three days. Breakthrough Listen has made observations from Green Bank on 8 days this month, so far.

Breakthrough Listen will be conducting SETI observations today, May 22nd, from 18:15 to 00:00 hours UT. It will listen tomorrow, from 20:00 to 05:15 UT, for a total of 15 hours, over the course of two days.

In addition, Principal Investigator Dr. Jean-Luc Margot , of the UCLA SETI Group, made SETI observations from 10:15 to 12:15 UT, today. This project hopes to examine 16 TESS Objects and 3500 promising exoplanet systems. They listened in the L Band (1000 to 2000 MHz) for 10 Hertz bandwidth signals. It is estimated that they could detect a transmitter similar to the one that operated at Arecibo, at a distance of 420 lightyears.