If someone handed you a 5 and 1/4 inch floppy disk
and ask you to pull the data off of it,
you'd probably be at a loss, unless you
had a 1980s computer collecting dust in your house somewhere.
It's probably under a stack of Mad and Tiger Beat magazines,
if you have one.
As technology improves, methods of storing and extracting data
become obsolete.
When summary data was extracted from the 1960 Census schedules
it was stored on tapes that could
be read by UNIVAC computer.
Well, there aren't a lot of UNIVAC computers
around at the moment waiting to read 1960 census summary data.
In fact, there was a report that by the 1970s
there were only two computers that
could read the information.
One was in the Smithsonian and the other is in Japan.
But remember, I said summary data.
This is not the same as the images
of the documents themselves.
The National Archives is in the business
of identifying data to be preserved
and developing sound methods to preserve that data.
And the people at the National Archives
knew that people at the Bureau of the Census
had microfilm that transcribed census schedules
and preserved the microfilm.
The data on the tapes was used for aggregation of data
and statistical analysis.
The microfilm still exists.
Of course, the 1960 census won't be available to the public
until 2032.
What is a genealogist to do?
You can build a time machine, or better yet
if you want to learn more about how this story came to be
and about the UNIVAC tapes that held the aggregate information,
the National Archives published an in-depth article
in Prologue Magazine titled Myths and Realities
about the 1960 Census, which you can access
via the link on your screen.