[QuadList] .NBC is said to have trashed around 15 years of "Tonight Show" tapes

[Dennis Degan]

		On Mar 1, 2009, at 7:29 PM, COURYHOUSE at aol.com wrote:

http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/columnists/glenn-garvin/story/ 
924730.html
 
''A lot of Carson was lost,'' he notes. 'It's tragic, actually.  
Carson's shows from the mid-'60s until the late '70s were all kept in  
an NBC storage facility. And some accountant decided in the late '70s:  
`What's all this stuff?' Someone said, these are just old tapes. 'Well,  
get rid of them.' So they destroyed them. . . . What we have of Carson  
is a lot of stuff that Carson himself had saved. But they lost a ton.''

		I offer:

	Did anyone here see CBS Sunday Morning yesterday?  David Pogue,  
technology writer for the New York Times did a report on how difficult  
it is to archive video and audio.  He interviewed the head of VidiPax,  
showing an AVR-3 running a tape of Cronkite doing the Evening News.   
Someone I work with at NBC named Lydia was also interviewed about her  
1986 university video on EIAJ tape that she can no longer play because  
there are no machines available to her to view it with.  She said she  
hadn't seen the program on that tape in 20 years.
	This situation is almost as bad as throwing the Carson tapes away.  If  
you have nothing to play them on, you can't archive them for the  
future.  And there's no such thing as a permanent storage medium.

			Dennis Degan, Editor-Consultant-Knowledge Bank
	  				NBC Today Show, New York