About a year ago the Avaneya project released software that can decode the Viking Lander tapes. A few tapes conatain images that were (as far as I know) never released.<p>Samples:
<a href="https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/fa995a3277d500ab59b1" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/jakeogh/fa995a3277d500ab59b1</a><p><a href="https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Avaneya:_Viking_Lander_Remastered_DVD" rel="nofollow">https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Avaneya:_Viking_Lander_Remast...</a>
I find old data strangely fascinating. I actually enjoy working with legacy systems every now and then - the older the better. There's something therapeutic about carefully making sense out of old and/or poorly maintained data.<p>I wonder if there's a business opportunity in this area, especially for digital data. Something like a consultancy specialized in extracting legacy data and migrating it to modern databases where it could easily queried.
It's pretty amazing that something pushing the absolute limit of technology in the 1960s is now something that you could bundle up, throw together as a torrent, and publish for anyone curious enough to look at it.
A bit more detail here including picture of the "data" (i.e. metal film cans):<p><a href="http://nsidc.org/monthlyhighlights/2013/04/glimpses-of-sea-ice-past/" rel="nofollow">http://nsidc.org/monthlyhighlights/2013/04/glimpses-of-sea-i...</a><p>Which linked to this paper in the journal "The Cryosphere":<p><a href="http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/699/2013/tc-7-699-2013.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/699/2013/tc-7-699-2013.pdf</a>
I'm confused by this bit:<p>"...the scientists had recorded the images on magnetic tape, played it back on a TV monitor, then snapped photographs of the TV monitor. What he had were those images, sporadically placed along rolls of film as long as the wingspan of a Boeing 787."<p>Can someone elaborate on this?
A similar stash of data data is in the libraries of the agencies that did the research for the various over-the-horizon-radars around the world. Australia's DSTO has rooms full of magnetic tapes with decades worth of ionospheric measurements on them.
These data are available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC): <a href="http://nsidc.org/data/nimbus/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://nsidc.org/data/nimbus/index.html</a>
the reference to dark data is interesting - I didn't know there was still so much data out there that hadn't been digitized! This kind of stuff would be great for a kickstarter campaign though..