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How hard is it to read disks and punch cards from the 1950's and 1960's? and that's just 30 years ago! I don't think those 10 1/2 DEC floppies is going to fit in anything, but, hey!, at least you can read old Mac, C64, Amiga, PC 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 inch disk (even protected) with Cat weasel! http://www.jschoenfeld.de/products/cwmk3_e.htm

They send a global email looking for anyone with old C64 hardware,

How reliable are those 20 year old floppy disks?

This is simple. Get a Catweasel floppy controller, and use the bundled tools to make images of the disks. You don't even need any of the original Commodore hardware for this, any PC 5.25" drive will do.

If they're too cheap to do that, an X1541 cable and a copy of Star Commander will work fine, plugged between the Commodore drive and a PC. This shouldn't be forensically valid, because the 1541 is a smart peripheral and could concievably be running a modified ROM.

The Catweasel is a PCI floppy controller (among other things), and boasts support for over 1100 disk formats. I plan to start backing up my old Amiga and C64 disks with this one "any day now".

No sweat. =)

You can buy a Catweasel. Or alternately, you can pop on eBay and snag an old Amiga for about 50 bucks. Find a Fred Fish disk with a terminal program...buy a null modem cable and move the files over.

Currently that's what I do. I DMS a disk into a file, and then null-modem it to my laptop. WinUAE runs 99% of the images I make that way.

Hope that helps. BTW, my Amiga 500 was my first C programming experience too. Aztec C. Loved it.

Inexpensive alternatives for the PC include the PCI Catweasel (also an Amiga keyboard and mouse controller, and a versatile floppy controller). I've got one of these and a nice collection of Commodore SIDs that I use Acid64 to listen to. The quality is great and you can use the SID chip of your choice. (I actually got the card to read some old floppies, but the SID is a great bonus feature.)

For more synth power (more like the SidStation) you can get a HardSID PCI card with up to four SID chips for advanced synthing. I don't have one of these, so I can't speak for the quality, but I've heard good things.

You should pick up a Catweasel. It's a universal floppy controller for old media which can read Commodore, Amiga, Mac 800k, and other formats directly with modern floppy drives.

The new Catweasel apparently also includes joystick/paddle ports and HardSID functionality. Yesss! :)

As far as beating bitrot by multiplying the data: You can also use software FEC encoding to add check blocks to the data, growing it by less than an integer multiple. Repairing the errored bits is automatic, whereas storing multiple copies of the file still gives you no easy way to tell which copy is correct.

Periodically rewriting the data and correcting for small errors that occur will prevent the accumulation of errors too large to be corrected. In RAM this is known as memory scrubbing and is used on some high-end servers to counteract cosmic rays and bit-rot.

It's also a good way to detect impending media failure. Your drives should have SMART enabled, so you know when they're covering up a growing problem, and can get your data out of harm's way. This only protects against gradual deterioration however, and is no substitute for a backup in case of catastrophic drive failure.

These questions are dealt with all the time by serious archivists. Storing metadata to provide context is important too. Historians of the future will probably have a thousand copies of "Driller.d64" but will they know what the original floppy label looked like?

Heh, actually I have forwarded port 80 to the Commodore before (using the Contiki web server and RR-Net ethernet adaptor), but in this case the graphic was several times larger than a CBM-format 5.25" disk. :)

And if the new Commodore really cared about the old fans, they'd include a big honkin' socket for a real SID on their portable music players. The High Voltage SID Collection is only 35.6MB (compressed) and it contains months and months of music.

I think that the Pegasos with MorphOS is pretty similar to the Amiga community designing its own hardware with software. The MorphOS was running on original Amigas with PPCs before this whole AmigaONE thing was even invented...

But really, the CLOSEST thing to a new computer from scratch with software coming from the Amiga community has got to be the C=ONE, with backing from individual Computers. though it's meant to emulate [not like SOFTWARE emulate, but like DICTIONARY emulate] a C64.

individual Computers have consistently been some of the most ingenious hardware designers on ANY platform ... but who choose [have chosen] to use the Amiga as their basis for most projects over the past decade...

Heh, I remember how Amigas used to have a more powerful FDD controller than PC's, meaning they could squeeze more on a disk; the space-optimized filesystems there let you squeeze almost 1MB onto a single DD floppy vs the already impressive default of 880k; and yup, you got nearly 2M from a HD floppy! ;)

Anyone wanting to try such amazing technology today can use a Catweasel, although I'm not sure if it supports anything more exotic than standard Mac/Amiga floppies.

Anyone who's got a CatWeasel MK3 card in a Windows PC should visit Jens' site and get the skinny on Arjuna. I got it running last weekend and I've written a few C64 disks using a normal 1.2MB floppy drive. Should help get GEOS onto a real C64. Now I just need GEOS drivers and software for the RR-Net cart. Not that Contiki isn't good too, but it would be really nice if the extra RAM in the Retro Replay cart was used to improve the web browser.

Anyone who's got a CatWeasel MK3 card in a Windows PC should visit Jens' site and get the skinny on Arjuna. I got it running last weekend and I've written a few C64 disks using a normal 1.2MB floppy drive. Should help get GEOS onto a real C64. Now I just need GEOS drivers and software for the RR-Net cart. Not that Contiki isn't good too, but it would be really nice if the extra RAM in the Retro Replay cart was used to improve the web browser.

Learning to expand an existing OS, and there are plenty of small ones to choose from, will teach you much more than building your own one from scratch.

The Catweasel Mk3 is a PCI card with, amongst other things, two old-school 9-pin sub-D digital joystick ports. I believe there are Linux drivers, so this may help plenty of /.ers, but I'm still a Windows person and I'm hanging out for Windows drivers for these ports. Anyone feel like making my year?

i actually just ordered a rr-net ethernetcard for my C64 so i can connect it too the web.. i think that's the oldest hardware i got in use..

In the 'bigger chip' category... Coldfires are fun. (Strong)ARMs are popular. Embedded PowerPC is more prevalent than you'd think. MIPS makes a showing in various guises. 486s and Geodes are great fun for some.

And SuperH seems to go overlooked, though it did crop up in the Dreamcast. Here's one 'DIY' project that used it:

http://www.azpower.com/mylinux/
And the guy explained why he liked it:
http://www.azpower.com/mylinux/why_superh.html
He also shows how FPGAs can be used. What ever happened to that project!? I wanted one!

It does seem like GCC for SH has been a bit.. 'variable' or 'neglected' of late. But now that the 3.x branch has settled, I gather it's improving/seeing maintainership again.

The Kaii - http://kaii.info/ was supposed to have been another SuperH design, but I haven't heard a peep about it, either. (They wanted to design SH boards in appropriate form-factors, port the OpenPDA platform of the Zaurus and friends to it, and license their designs to manufacturers cheap. I assume they were stymied by some of GCC's unsettledness.)

Meanwhile, if you want to start by 'reverse-engineering' an existing design, the "CommodoreOne" will be a well-documented design when it's finally released, also using FPGAs to good effect. Sadly, the project pages are perpetually down at the moment (unless someone knows where they've moved), but it's a simple uATX board, and will be produced/sold by Individual Computer - http://jschoenfeld.de/indexe.htm" - when they finally get things straightened out. Google may help if you care. There's another (unrelated) project out there for a similar but simpler design meant to resemble early arcade or home game systems' boards, but sadly, I can't remember the name of it.

For Retro fans interested in c64 technology and nostalgia, the upcoming Amiga Messe in Aachen may be of interest.

Next to Amiga products, Jeri Ellsworth will travel from the US to the show to launch a new c64 compatible clone, called the c-one.

The c-one is a MicroATX form factor board, with at its core a (65c816 processor running approximately at 20 MHz) the 65c816 is a 6502 compatible processor with a 24 bit address range extra instructions that access the full memory range are added to the 6502 core.

Another interesting product which will be sold at the Aachen fair is the new Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper board. This PCI board can be used with the c-one, AmigaOne boards, Pegasos boards, Classic Amigas and even ordinary PCs to read just about any disk format using ordinary mainstream diskdrives (including 880kb/1,76 MB Amiga disks and c64 disks!), connect digital c64/Amiga/Atari joysticks, connect Amiga keyboards or even add a real c64 SID soundchip'.

Here's a picture:
http://home.t-online.de/home/indcomp/bin/cwmk3.jpg

For more information about this Catweasel product look here.

Another interesting product which will be sold at the Aachen fair is the new Catweasel MK3 PCI/Flipper board. This PCI board can be used with AmigaOne boards, Pegasos boards, Classic Amigas and even ordinary PCs to read just about any disk format using ordinary mainstream diskdrives (including 880kb/1,76 MB Amiga disks), connect digital c64/Amiga/Atari joysticks, connect Amiga keyboards or even add a real c64 SID soundchip'.

Here's a picture:
http://home.t-online.de/home/indcomp/bin/cwmk3.jpg

For more infor turn here.

Previous slashdot coverage.

Also interesting for Retro fans is that an ATX form factor c64 clone will be launched at the upcoming fair as well. (No kidding!)

While the windows drivers are a given, I think it's interesting that companies like this will provide linux drivers and support, but no Mac drivers or support. The Mac desktop market is significantly larger than the linux desktop market, so it's not a marketshare issue.

But then, I guess Mac users are used to just throwing their computers away when it's upgrade time, and buying another one that "just works" (until new hardware comes out).