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Retro Machines Key to Rescuing Old Data
SimilarityEngine writes "New Scientist report on the virtues of old kit. From the article:
'Today's stylish PCs may perform billions of calculations a second and store tens of billions of bytes of data, but for many, they have got nothing on the 32, 48 or 64-kilobyte machines that were the giants of the early 1980s.
This renewed interest in old-school computing is more than just a trip down memory-chip lane. Early computers are a part of our technological heritage, and also offer a unique perspective on how today's machines work. And within growing collections of original computers and home-made replicas, and the anecdote-filled web pages and blogs devoted to them, lies the equipment and expertise that will one day help unlock our past by reading countless computer files stored in outmoded formats.'"
The IBM 5100 was good enough for John Titor, so buy one now!
My friend John Titor told me that the IBM 5100 is going to be very popular soon.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
Which storage media would last this long? What's the point of using old computers to get your data if the media is dead?
Funny that archeology in the future will be totally different. Instead of trying to maximise information out of a 2500 BC chicken bone, the art will be how to distill meaning out of gazillions of backup tapes... But true, I already spent half a day once trying to load my own thesis....
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Seems to be a growing interest in the Commodore community. On irc.eskimo.com #c64friends channel, there's a bunch of people developing software and hardware for the C64 and 128. There's one guy even working entirely in the CP/M mode of the 128. Since I had to pack my 128 system up to move, I haven't done anything with it lately, but after the new computer room is setup in the house, I'll be back in full swing. 16MHz 65c02 processor, 16MB RAM, 2GB HDD... it's not your father's Commodore.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
You don't need a Vic-20 to read an audio cassette tape... you just need something that can capture the audio stream, some sort of analogue signal converter capable of producing a binary digit stream. Something like an "analogue-to-digital" converter if such said device exists all our problems are saved! ... /sarcasm
Yes, retro computing is cool. No, it's not required to read ancient recording formats.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If you really want to programm in assembler and want to learn how computers work, buy an old C64 and the the Data Becker C64 Bible, or an old Amiga at Ebay. If you want to to the same on a modern iP4-machine, you'll give up faster than a SETI@home-package is analyzied ;)
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".
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
I just gave a speech to a bunch of progressive groups in Kentucky Saturday that included a screed on data loss. Twenty two years after starting a lawsuit on fair taxation and coal reserves, for example, the suit finally made it through the courts. My question was: how good a job are we doing preserving the records and data for those cases that take 30 or 50 years, like tobacco or asbestos. I'm looking ahead to the lawsuits on global warming.
If you want to see the talk:
http://www.hollowground.net/tecactv
wh
There's certainly good reason to keep old data readers about the place.. I once spent a very dull weekend with a cassette->parallel interface loading some old ZX Spectrum code onto a pc and encoding the files into .z80 format. But there's no good reason at all to keep the rest of the hardware around. Every system before about 1995 has been emulated on faster, more stable modern system that afford us things like memory save points, video output recording, and other pleasentries.
Old hardware is dead.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I'm surprised the article didn't link to old-computers.com:
http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp
Plenty of "Replica"-esque machines on mini-itx. The best two are probably
http://mini-itx.com/projects/bbcitxb/
http://mini-itx.com/projects/sx64/
When I was working at the local Humane Society, I saved a Apple Mac II/ci from the dumpster. It had been donated to the thrift store and was thrown away because it was 'too old' to interest anyone.
I like playing certain old games, mainly because if a game is done right, it doesn't matter how outdated the graphics get -- Classics never change.
There's just something you get out of playing the Zork Trilogy on the old hardware that you don't get on the new stuff.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
You'd be amazed at what we've got running under Hercules...there's a lot of computing history being lost because people threw away old round tapes, thinking "Oh, we'll never run THAT again". A guy used an emulator to rescue old census data from Africa (was the story reported here? It wasn't that long ago), and that kind of thing will be only seen more as time goes on.
If you know of old IBM mainframe software on tape, drop me a note; chances are I can recover it. I've got 9-track and 3480 cartridge tape drives on a PC just for that purpose.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
The BBC here in the UK did a radio program about getting music and video from old recordings and vinyl, even old 78 RPMs. The problem, once you've got the data off, is how you store it on a media that won't degrade over time. Even CDs are thought to have a limited lifespan of possibly only up to 100 years.
The only practical solution for "permanent" data storage currently are huge RAID hard disk arrays where you can replace a drive as it goes faulty.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The universal format for documentation, I believe, is the printed hard-copy document. Think of it this way: If we received the Rosetta Stone, or bits of the Torah or Quran, on some electronic media, would we have been able to get the content off - especially if it was encrypted somehow?
I think the only universal format is the printed page, which requires no "special equipment" to read (it might not be interpretable, but it can easily be recognised as a document) whereas a computer-recorded pile of numbers, while perhaps recognisable has having meaningful content, will probably, in the future, have no context in which to extract its meaning. Consider this: you receive some piece of hardware in the future which you realise stores binary data. Is it numbers? Is it a program? Is it sample data from atmospheric noise collection? All you know is there is binary data. All you know is there is binary data, and you don't even know if it is stored in 8-bit blocks, 16-bit blocks, 3 bit-blocks, or whatever. You don't know if it's in ASCII or some weird encoding of, say, Farsi. You might try running some statistical analysis on it to see if it's some kind of language, but against what do you compare the 'glyphs' of the numbers? When you see a stone like the rosetta stone, it's obvious what you've got; when you've got a list of numbers, there is no way to tell what it is other than a list of numbers.
This is a great danger of the digital age, in my opinion, and it is good that there is still expertise floating around about the "old" equipment. But remember, the "old" equipment is still less than a century old: what will happen in 100 more years? 400? I have this nagging concern that data integrity of digital media will not last the thousands of years that printed material lasted for future generations. I think this is why I really don't like the idea of digitising the libraries, or even digitising photography.
Definitely something to consider for all those folks concerned with "the best data format" and if .DOC or .PDF or XML or whatever is better.
The best format is one that contains enough information to clue the interpreters how to interpret it rather than relying on something else. Right now, all digital documents are merely a string of numbers, and a string of numbers is not sufficient to contain meaning to interpret itself - those numbers rely on some interpreter to receive meaning (as an excersise to prove this, take any file on your computer and look at it in a debugger - on various systems, a hex-editor, and a program that will use the contents of any file as raw image or audio data. It might not be rendered sensibly (I don't know that I'd want to listen to the "song" that, say, Firefox would be), but there is no effective way to tell if the string of numbers has meaning by using trial and error.
A printed document unequivocally has more information than this - a schemaatic diagram is different than a picture of an apple is different than a poem... and while we may not know 'apple' or the language of the poem or have the capability to understand the diagram, we know that those things aren't, say, a random paint splatter.
So, again, while I applaud the efforts of these guys for writing down their knowledge, if they don't do it in a "universal" format, who will be around to interpret their blogs and digital records in 1000 years?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
sorry for taking so long to post a reply, but I haven't got the dual-core upgrade for my abacus yet!
Old machines are good learning tools, even if only on paper, although they were easier to work upon in my electronics class.
Hardware concepts haven't significantly changed over the years. What has changed, significantly, is that everything has become smaller. Once the basics are understood through learning of these old machines, the more complex concepts of more modern machines can be more easily understood. Good Computer Architecture classes will start off on the hardware of these old machines first, and build off those concepts as the class moves into understanding newer machines.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
My family's old Atari 400 (w/the cool keyboard upgrade, of course!) has been stored out at my parents for years... I'll have to dig that out and clean it up for future emergencies.
After all, where would the world be if we couldn't play Miner 2049'er down the road?
I really like how Bill Gates and Paul Allen are "a small seattle firm" instead of a couple of kids into programming languages who weren't anywhere near seattle at the time.
I don't know if there is really a revival of old computers. The article doesn't really present evidence, it just makes some assumptions and runs with them to justify what is, after all, just a fetish. One that I share, granted, but not because I have an great fantasies that my IBM luggable laptop is ever going to restore important data to me.
What is the definition of a "retro" machine? My blog here is running on, what i consider to be, a retro machine. It's a 233 recently reformatted with Fedora Core 3. (Yes I know 4 is out)
While many many not think this is very old, I guess it's basically because I can't find a way to hook up my Tandy 1000 to the internet, (or i'd have my blog on it.. that'd be funny)
Tightly coded assembly and BASIC software running on old machines (486s, sun IPXs) are often capable of performing their tasks a few orders of magnitude faster than equivelent software written in high level languages (Python, Java, Ruby, C++ with all the trimmings, etc) running on today's hardware.
There are a number of Amiga demos that won't play on UAE, no matter what you do.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
the people in the IT industry couldnt quite make it as teachers, so they had to resign themselves to boring cubicle hell
That's why I keep my Commodore 64 with 1541 and 1571 disk drives.
That way I can read someone's pirated Donkey Kong or Questron diskette.
You never know when an opportunity like that to be of service to all of mankind will appear.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Surpulus AN/UYK-7 case, preferably with ferrite core memory modules and control panel, for admittedly perverse case-modding project.
No real interest in programming the thing in CMS-2, just want it for a conversation piece.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Better yet buy a DC-3 to learn about flight dynamics. Truth is, old is old. There are practical limits to what you can learn from it because what THEY knew about when they built it was limited or in some ways flawed outright.
I know, I know...it's hard to believe that something can run as slow as 333MHz, but I've got it in my basement...it has layers of dust and spider webs built up over the many many years. I think they might have been used back around the time of The Great War. When I visit my grandpa in the home, I ask him...what was it like using parallel ATA drives when the BIOS limited you to less than 128GB. He was so overcome with emotion remembering those heady days that he said "get the hell out of my room!" (he's just covering up...I know that when I left he started sobbing remembering ....he may even be old enough to have used a Pentium I @ 75Mhz in pre-school...I don't know)
Anyway...thank you for letting me share my memories.
Heck...I just heard that before the Mac G5, there was even a Mac G3! Wow.
While I now regret selling my trusted old ZX Spectrum many years ago, I regret even more waiting 20 years before trying to convert old tapes. Not commercial software that was sold in many copies and must still exist somewhere, but my first baby steps into programming. Truly irreplaceable! Now half of the files are corrupted and I lost a small but significant part of my personal history. Don't feel obliged to care, please.
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
If you want to have some fun just try to get data off an Iomega zip disk that was compressed with the built in DriveSpace compression. Getting Win95 & iomega parallel port drivers working in 2005 was surprisingly painful.
Your problem is not one alone; it's a very common problem. How do you read anything without the direct knowledge of the language?
The answer is a common translator table, which you hinted to in your own post. If not for the Rosetta stone, we would have no translation for heiroglyphs, and that written language would be entirely lost to us.
It really wouldn't matter if you left something written in english emblazed on a wall, in stone, or on an old floppy disk inside of an old floppy drive. A person in 1000 years couldn't read it, regardless, because (hopefully) in a thousand years, nobody will speak our version of English.
What matters is our persistance in open standards. The more people who know how to read it, the more people will pass the knowledge on. That's all that matters in this case.
By the way, G.E.B's an awesome book. Make sure you keep a copy on your shelf.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Unless, I suppose, you have data stored on some bizzare medium that can only be read by old hardware. As far as I know (which is not all that far, admittedly) only a Spectrum +3 can read the old +3 floppy disks. If memory serves they were 3 inch rather than 3.5.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
As the odds of selling it on eBay approach zero, the pile in my attic grows.
But i think its the reason i can now drive my finger through a pine board.
I have a large bag of sinclair spectrum 48k/128k tapes that I occasionally trip over when I wander around the darker recesses of my office. Does anyone want 'them' for posterity. Some of them might even work! If people really wanted to keep hold of old data, they wouldn't have written it down on the media equivilant of the back of a used envelope, would they!
Search for this for an actual implementation:
http://www.google.com/search?q=wav2cas
Gee, how was that saying? Wait a min, I have it in my old machine which no longer boots...
My computer science prof always told me computers lie, but I never believed him!
True enough about printed outbut being a best cantidate for survival, but the central problem in recovering the data is interpreting the data stream. Basic ASCII and EBCDIC are well documented, as are the other common font conversions. But what will you do when you come across something oddball, such as Cherokee, Chinese, Thai, or Tibetan Fonts? How many variations are there, and where is the common library?
Allright, so now you can read an unformatted TXT file... What about spreadsheets, databases, sound, and imagery? How about reading them from 9-inch floppies, Osborne disks, or those huge 1 megabyte multi-plate hard-drive platter stacks? There you need not only an original/compatible machnie, but more importantly, you need to know the DATA STREAM FORMAT.
How many sectors/tracks and where? What are the headers/trailers and sector structure? When you've extracted a binary stream from the original source, how was the, say, database/spreadsheet laid out? Which/where are the rows, columns, tuples, relvars, relations, and operators? Color, font, and column size declarations? OLE crosslinks to other files on the same source?
Oooo... somone clever used an early image/sound compression format -- how do you unpack it? ARC/LZH/ARJ/ZIP/Other? Remember ZORK text file compression? Orca-M compiler? UCSD Pascal? FORTH? 1-2-3? Lisp? Foxpro?
The point is that saving old data using antique equipment (or compatible emulators) will require knowing the structure of the data streams being read. Documenting that structure is at least as important as getting the emulator working properly.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
Of course, having extracted all that I can extract, and facing a move cross-country, I am now contemplating getting rid of the Apple II gear--but part of me just doesn't want to let it go just yet. ..bruce..
P.S. You can see the main loop of the SunDog program here.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
http://www.bytecellar.com
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Tapes are relatively easy as the 64 can read most of the, the hard part is that sone disk formats are hard to come by, the Commodore PET has several different format drives, the most popular are the 4040/2031 which a Commodore 64 can read, but the 512k single sided 8050 and double sided 8250/SFD-1001 disks are another matter both using quad density drives (nowhere related to the PC HD format) and GCR encoded to increase capacity. These drives (unless you are a hardware whiz) communicate exclusively using IEEE-488 so A PET/CBM or B128 are best employed.
I myself use the PC-to-pet interface the C2N232 with related software to get the files fron the PET to the PC, from there it's a matter of some home spun chipmunk BASIC programs to get the files tidyed up and in ASCII.
To be consistently successful at it you have to not only have the tools but knowledge of the various disk and file formats and system quirks that you are dealing with, which will help you get around the unexpected.
I've had requests to help convert 64 related software, but have passed on that as I am not into real time programming work (some sort of lighting program on a cartridge) but there are others up to that challenge.
Same goes for other platforms like old 400k Mac disks which use a varialble speed drive and can only be read IIRC on a 68k mac using System 6 or lower. There are also the protected disks or those that were recorded with utilities to improve speed or capacity (which makes the disks/tapes differ from any knwn standard format). Not everything can be done with an emulator.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
A few years back there was columnist in PC Magazine who wrote about how proud he was that he scanned the instruction booklets and sheets from everything he bought into his computer and put them on CD. These scans where in JPEG format.
What happens 10 years from now when Microsoft Windowze no longer reads that file format and jpeg has been superceded by some other format. Is he and all the other millions of people with jpeg photos going to stay current? How about when CDs are obsoleted for the DVD format du jour?
What if some your company's documents were first created in DOS on Wordstar 1.0 and the originals are needed for a lawsuit?
This all assumes that we have any interest in reading your old data?
If the data has any importance its storage methodology would have been updated along the way. Some times its OK for old data to die.
A fun thing is also the fact that old computers, no matter how expensive they were as new, are really not worth anything. It's now possible to buy computers which used to be far beyond a normal hobbyist's reach, such as Silicon Graphics workstations or large mainframes. I, for example, got a Sun SparcServer 670MP for free - a really awesome machine the size of a small fridge. Not that it's particulary useful these days, but just exploring the internals of that beast was an adventure by itself.
I used to get mold on some of my old (Apple) 5 1/4" floppies.
I was surprised to learn that taking the floppies out of the sleeve and washing them carefully with some cotton balls, water and soap would pretty much always solve the problem, at least long enough to recover the data.
Sometimes simple non-tech solutions are what you need.
/* TAANSTAFL */
Example, no one gets busted for playing old ZX Spectrum games. Many ancient developers or subsequent copyright holders (if they can be tracked down that is) have already given permission. There were a couple of notable holdouts, but it hardly matters in the real world.
It would be astonishing for someone to get in trouble for playing games written 22 years ago. It just doesn't happen because common sense has to prevail here. And guess what ? It does.
Sure you can get the sounds digitised. But you do need to know and/or document what all the beeps/whirs on that tape are for. You can read the tones with any decent audio capture program, but if you don't know how the data is written it's useless.
Better yet, a couple generations from now people might not even realise it's computer data and think it's horribly mutilated music (think hardcore metal...)
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Before you use such an incredibly ignorant anology, I'd like to point out that the Model T could run on cow paths and rutted, muddy roads that would stop a modern 4-wheel drive SUV dead in it's tracks. It was so simple to drive and maintain that an illiterate could operate it.
It was over-engineered to survive and keep going despite the fact that was regularly abused and run on the most horrible roads almost 100% of the time.
In many, MANY ways, it was more advanced than modern vehicles. And what is most sad is that you do not realize this -- newer is not necessarily better.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
...I can finally go back on a nostalgia trip and see my high school reports again... Oh, that's right, the old 5.25" floppies decayed, their domains flipped, and mildew began eating them YEARS ago.
Guess I'll have to settle for sifting floppies from 1995...
A better thing to learn from retro would be cartridges. If the chip makers packeged them with a cooling and fan assembly in a cartridge you just shoved into a slot on the board, they'd take up less space and leave more for making motherboards SMPs by default. They could even have a metal backplane with cooling channels and inlet and outlet ports for hooking to water cooling systems.
Heck, take a page from single board computers and pack most of the needed parts into a modular cartridge and let us build inexpensive cluster servers for our homes. We want more power so the kids can play games, we shell out for another processor cartridge. Modularity of the sort we used to have with some systems is something we badly need given that the average user finds themselves stymied by the maze of cabling in even the best assembled PCs these days.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
The thing that I did was write some utilities for the emulator that allowed it to talk directly to a "real" Flex box via a simple serial port (ACIA) and grab files from it -- so there's a connection to the hardware for anyone who still has hardware, and that lets them retrieve the old data.
Once your data is in a modern machine, there's no particular reason it should ever be lost -- of course, that means you have to be proactive enough to go after your data while you still have the old hardware.
We've sat several summer interns down at the emulator with the goal of learning assembly language; every one of them left with a rock-solid understanding of everything from stacks to interrupts to exactly how a c compiler works. There is a lot to be said for a system of low enough complexity that you can wrap your head entirely around it in a summer.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Casettes play better in tape players than CD-Rom drives!
1 Get an old dead C64 or V20 :)
2 Make a board that interfaces to the keyboard and and the joystick ports to a USB port.
3 Write a driver.
4 profit??? Well at least fun
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
CDs should be migrated every few years in order to safely know that they will survive. Again, keep those CDs in separate locations if possible.
TNA have some guidance on media handling on their Digital Preservation pages: Digtal Preservation advice
Think about it if you released any program to the public domain after it has no chance of making the owner any earnings you will destroy the GPL?
There is little chance of a GPL program making the author money so it then becomes public domain? Which means that someone can take the code modify it and make it a closed source product.
What needs to happen is for companies to release the programs as public domain or at least free. How about it EA???
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Files have headers Mime types exist Unless they were never meant to be read by anyone, are there any formats that are sanscrit to us at this point?
In high school I came across, and saved a paper copy, an article complaining about the amount of data already lost to old computer tapes from the '60s to date. This article, from 1991, was not located with a search on the current Miami Herald site. (There is a joke in there somewhere). So, I've scanned and posted it for all to enjoy.
http://www.floydsoft.com/olddataarticle.doc
Read about the early space mission data lost, old census data, agent orange drops, and more. The man interviewed is involved with the National Archives. If you search for his name you'll come across some pretty interesting articles on what the U.S. government is trying to do to save all this data.
Most academic and industrial chemistry labs are filled with old instruments running with equally old 32, 48 or 64-kilobyte machines. In my analytical chemistry class, (only 4 years ago), being able to use DOS was essential to being able to use the computers in the lab. Even in some of the labs where I've had co-op placements there have been machines over 25 years old. Usually they're simply too expensive to replace, or other funding priorities exist, and they have to keep using them. There's going to be a growth industry around data retrieval from these old formats! Most of them need a back-up copy of the data and paper too often takes up too much space.
Thats why I always save my completed work in plain txt format in addition to the Doc format. You never know, I might come back to that work several years later only to find out that the file format is outdated and the text can no longer be retrieved.
I just put my XT back together to help someone pull data off of their 20 Meg MFM harddrive.
This is a topic that I wrote a few articles on a while back.
Read Intro to Digital Archeology for an overview.
More here.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I am amazed how many times an investment will be made in finding, buying and restoring an old machine enough to read a single set of data and then once the job is done...the machine is sent to the scrapyard.
I wonder how much of the first fifty years of modern computing will be left for my kids to actually see and use? Is there really value in this or is it enough to know "what" was available in the past and "how" it formed the present, or do you have to have the original source? Are there precedents or examples from other areas of technology to use as a guide? How important is having a working steam engine to understanding a fully computer controlled, variable valve geometry hybrid electric-internal combustion engine powered vehicle anyway? (This from someone who's collection includes a Xerox 850, a Point4 mini, yes, a C-128d and a v20, one-of-each compact Mac, a model "A" 5150, a TRS-80, etc., etc.)...
My first computer I owned was a Timex/Sinclair 1000/ZX-81. The TS1000 had such a weird keyboard layout (membrane keypad that made working in BASIC easier by letting you press a function key followed by a regular key to enter a whole keyword with just those 2 presses), that the TS1000 emulators I've seen are very difficult to work with. Your standard PC keyboard isn't going to be properly labeled for all those alternate functions of the standard keys.
Emulators are typically evolving works in progress too. How often do you see an emulator that guarantees 100% compatibility? I know most of the game system emulators I've used have trouble playing at least 30% or more of the games without major issues (graphics glitches, sound not functional, etc. etc.).
Emulation is a great idea, and it will probably allow SOME people to get rid of old hardware they otherwise felt they had to hang onto -- but there's no substitute for having the real thing, if you want to use it fairly extensively.
I'm one of those old "retro geezers" myself that still have my old trusty SX-64 (Portable commodore 64..err...luggable) and an Amiga 1000.
Why? Exactly like the man said - they are pure gold when going back to the basics
Just think of it - you have limited hardware, but you know what you got. As a challenge you will try to stretch the hardware to it's breaking point and hopefully way beyond that. You thrive on new discoveries of what you can do with the hardware...stuff the hardware wasn't even made to do.
Another challenge is the use of the simple registers and limited math capabilities of those golden-days CPU's. Not to mention...trying to squeeze all of that fancy code down to fit the last bit of your memory. I taking out my trusty commodore, firing up the old Assembly Cartridge and go nuts all weekend. It may be sad and demented - but HEAPS of fun!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Thanks! I think everyone has had a PHB that printed every email (or had it done for them) before reading and replying. I had one that topped that; To edit spreadsheets, he'd print one out, mark it up with pen then load it back up and make the change. Recalculate, print and review. I'm just glad he had never heard of wget..
If you agree on a single archive media and format and *everyone* uses it, there will be enough information value to hopefully ensure that the knowledge is not lost. If it is lost (the decoding knowledge), there should be enough of a "payback" (all knowledge from this era) to warrant the small, one-time cost of deciphering, especially if a primer is included.
Question: Is there necessarily an inverse relationship between data density and storage stability?
if you go to http://infonomicon.org/text.html you can see some scans of a c64 manual, an ibm ps/2 manual, an apple 1 manual, and an apple basic book. if anyone wants to contribute either by sending me the book to scan or sending me the scan/pdf i would appreciate it.
Obviously all these machines are at least as old as the Spectrum, but as long as at least one can be found it should be possible to recover the data.
I agree that hardcopy is probably the best preservation format, but in this day of ever-increasing hard drive capacities, it might not be unreasonable to include source code for a rudimentary document reader in the document file itself. Someone with a hex editor
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Finally, someone who understands, LOL! Here's my recent take on the whole retro thing- http://www.lyzrdstomp.com/index.php?option=com_con tent&task=view&id=130&Itemid=0
Man, I LOVED 6502 Assembler...
John
Over the years I've occasionally looked at transfer services, but it's not worth it to me to pay $500 or so to transfer programs that at this point have little or no monetary value. But I would still like to have them for historical or sentimental reasons, and also to have my collection of debugged subroutines that I worked out years ago handily available to me. (I'd probably release them to GPL since I own the copyrights, although it's not clear they would be of general interest. But surprisingly, a few subroutines/algorithms that didn't get lost have gone through various generations of being translated to different languages and live on in various programs.)
Any suggestions for a cheap way to get the data off these tapes?
"My personal favourite is a white Siberian copy of a Sinclair Spectrum," says curator Tilly Blyth. "But then I'm an eighties girl."
*swoon*
Interesting article. In it you mention programming the VIC-20 using a cartridge with which you could write Assembly code, but without the benefit of labels. There was another option for the VIC-20. I wrote and marketed an assembler called, modestly enough, The Assembler for the VIC-20. It was and still is, to the best of my knowledge, the tiniest assembler ever written that supported labels. It ran on the undexpanded VIC and even supported address expressions using +, -, /, *, AND, OR, ^ (exponentiation)! You could also specify text and hex strings and even have comments in your code. It all ran in the 3583 bytes of available memory on the VIC. You could save the object code to tape for later loading with a separate program called The Loader. Of course your Assembly source had share memory with The Assembler, so it could only be about 150 lines long, and you could only get that many lines of code if you stuck to very short labels, though it supported labels up to 70 characters long.
Ah, the Amstrad 3" disk - the pricy, non-standard alternative to the 3.5" floppy. This wasn't just present in the Spectrum +3; the CPC 664/6128 (which shared much of its hardware with the +3) could read these disks, as could the late-80s PCWs.
They were also available in an external chassis for the Atari 8-bit line, as well as the Commodore 64/128 series.
I remember really wishing that I could afford one when I was ten or twelve years old.
--saint
Oops. I meant to reply to ivanjs. It was his lyzardstomp page that talked about writing Assembly code on the VIC-20. Just to put my post in the right context, here it is again: Interesting article. In it you mention programming the VIC-20 using a cartridge with which you could write Assembly code, but without the benefit of labels. There was another option for the VIC-20. I wrote and marketed an assembler called, modestly enough, The Assembler for the VIC-20. It was and still is, to the best of my knowledge, the tiniest assembler ever written that supported labels. It ran on the undexpanded VIC and even supported address expressions using +, -, /, *, AND, OR, ^ (exponentiation)! You could also specify text and hex strings and even have comments in your code. It all ran in the 3583 bytes of available memory on the VIC. You could save the object code to tape for later loading with a separate program called The Loader. Of course your Assembly source had to share memory with The Assembler, so it could only be about 150 lines long, and you could only get that many lines of code if you stuck to very short labels, though it supported labels up to 70 characters long.
My parents still have the Apple //e that I used as a kid to learn to program. I'd like to copy some of those old programs off, but I have no way to do so.
//e?
Does anyone know how I could copy stuff off of an Apple
Cow Cube
You copy over the data once and then use it on the emulator; no need to keep the disks (and the disks won't last anyway).
And I'm sure UAE can be fixed.
i found a kit for your upgrade
e &hl=en&hs=JfU&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&client=firefox -a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=N&tab=wf h s=lKp&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=o rg.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=N&tab=wf
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=gorilla%20glu
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=abacus&hl=en&
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
There a number of ways to do so. If you have a 3.5" drive and access to a mac, it can read the disk that way. If you have a PCTransporter card, you can save the data on PC formated disks. You can buy a compact flash reader i/o card and shrink your disks and transfer via the flash card.
)
I've not tried it but apparently you can now read Apple disks on a PC in FDI format and use a program called CiderPress to convert them after.
But the typical way is connecting a cable between the PC and the Apple and use ADT (http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/Sel/ADTWin.html
All of my disks are 5.25".
= projects/CFforAppleII/main.php>
CiderPress appears not to support those disks. "[Works for PC-format disks. Does not work with Apple-format 800KB and 1.6MB disks, nor 140KB 5.25" disks.]"
The PCTransporter card looks tricky since it requires hooking up a special drive.
But, the compact flash reader looks very promising!
<URL:http://dreher.net/?s=projects/CFforAppleII&c
The only problem there is that they're not actually selling anymore right now. I've emailed them. Hopefully they'll do another run.
Cow Cube
It's about software. You won't learn about software from a 'more accessible' ancient computer. Sorry but you wont.
I wrote pages of 6502 assembly with pencil and paper, hand assembled it and keyed the object into the hex keypad of my Kim-1 (I know, it reads like "I walked six miles to school every day in the snow, uphill both ways" but this is NOT a joke). I still recall the hex codes for several instructions and addressing modes, including the "two-cycle delay" instruction, $EA. And yes, I can tell the number of cycles of just about every instruction with every addressing mode. It's not that great an accomplishment, it's just that I did a good bit of code on the 6502 and these 8-bit processors were quite small and simple.
At least the Apple ][ had a crude hex-data-only, no-labels assembler as part of the ROM. Did I ever feel high-fallutin' on one of those things.
Tag lost or not installed.
The PCTransporter uses a standard apple 3.5" drive and reads 720k IBM floppies.
Yes I have a couple in my garage. They still run whenever I turn them on. They even die a decade earlier than Unix machines. Am I worried? No. I can always lie to the machine and tell it is 31 October 1972 for all it cares.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT