What would be your argument for getting budget to do that?
There are zillions of ways this hardware can break down. You can’t predict which ones you’ll have to handle, or whether there will be a way to recover from them. If you started researching this 30 years ago, and then something had killed this thing 20 years ago, that would be wasted effort.
Also, in the early years, they still could ask the original engineers, and even lacking those, there likely were engineers who hadn’t worked on this specific hardware but were somewhat familiar with this kind of hardware.
By then it was too late. Computer tapes were so expensive they were regularly overwritten after a certain number of years.
Cheap storage is one of the most fundamental and under-appreciated game-changers.
Another under-appreciated changes is standardization of computer architectures and formats. 8-bit bytes. ASCII/UTF-8. Even media formats which all largely follow the QuickTime style of different streams and atoms and so on even if the codecs change.
In the 1970s none of this was true and everything was (by our standards) completely bespoke.
There are zillions of ways this hardware can break down. You can’t predict which ones you’ll have to handle, or whether there will be a way to recover from them. If you started researching this 30 years ago, and then something had killed this thing 20 years ago, that would be wasted effort.
Also, in the early years, they still could ask the original engineers, and even lacking those, there likely were engineers who hadn’t worked on this specific hardware but were somewhat familiar with this kind of hardware.