When I was an intern for NASA I spent my time reading out 8mm data tapes onto a hard disk because we didn't have the bandwidth to transfer 5gb a night, so driving the data tapes to Tucson from Kitt Peak was the way we downloaded the data from the telescope to the office in Tucson. This was around the time Marc Aaronson was crushed to death by the telescope dome because of the observatory's badly thought out, unsafe design.
That may have been the most gruesome death in the entire history of astronomy, the fresh remains of his crushed body were smeared all around the bottom of the telescope dome and there was streaks of blood running down the building and there was no way to clean any of it off because it was all frozen the hoses didn't reach most of the mess anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_AaronsonAnyway it was 4 flights of stairs up to the refrigerated computer room where the tape drive was so I had to walk up there and switch tapes every two hours to get a new set of data to dark reduce & flat field & then identify the standard stars and identify the field stars with unusually high V-B because we were looking for stars outside the galactic plain which were off the main band of the HR diagram, I forget why, but I do remember that we could've done the whole project just by looking at digitized Palomar sky survey plates so the business with the schmidt camera on Kitt Peak and all the data tapes seemed completely unnecessary.
