I suspected as much. My degree is as an EE. It seemed pertinent to the discussion, as the difference between trying to recover data from a toasted hard drive requires a clean room, and not many people have considered building a drive controller out of vacuum tubes ... :>) -----Original Message----- From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mike Richter Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 2:39 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Audio storage on external hard drives At 02:32 PM 2/23/2005 -0600, Scott Phillips wrote: >..anyone consider what would happen to all the computers and hard disk >controllers if an EMT pulse from a nuclear weapon when off ??? The answer to your question is: yes. Unfortunately, while data have been collected and models have been constructed for some decades, to the best of my knowledge all of that work remains classified. It is not possible to generate a meaningful EMT pulse - and the values are staggering - in an unclassified environment. It happens that I spent some of my career working on just such matters. Suffice it to say that the memories considered and implemented to survive nuclear events bear little resemblance to anything you will find in a commercial computer. Mike -- [log in to unmask] http://www.mrichter.com/