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.'"

Comments

Catweasel!

[mkro]

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".

Retro Links

[hedgehog2097]

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/

Media Degradation Is The Issue

[pandrijeczko]

It's not so much that data is held in an "old" format, it's more that the media that it's stored on like tapes and floppy disks of varying shapes & sizes will degrade much quicker than, say, optical media.

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.

Re:Rubbish

[pandrijeczko]

It's actually copyright that's the problem here.

Unfortunately, unless you have been given express permission by the author/owner of the software to distribute the program freely, then the only way you can keep a copy of the program is to have the original intact also.

Personally, I believe that if there's no chance of a piece of software making the owner any more earnings then it should be released into the public domain automatically, say after 15 years or so. (Incidentally, I'm not necessarily talking about source code also, just the program).

At least then the genuine people who want to preserve the old games and software can do so openly without fear of legal action.

Re:emulators are good enough

[pandrijeczko]

That's true with a lot of emulators but a few, like UAE (Universal Amiga Emulator) for example, has problems with some (mainly AGA) software where the emulation of the original hardware isn't perfect.

There are a number of Amiga demos that won't play on UAE, no matter what you do.

Re:emulators are good enough

[SimilarityEngine]

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.

Havepeoplegotanythingbettertodo

[imnotbutyouare]

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!

Re:Universal Format

[pruss]

Writing isn't quite a universal format. Look at Linear A. :-)

Re:Universal Format

[Council]

Read this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345 315367/qid=1119278072/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/002-9620787-0418454?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

It's an account of how they put together the data stored on the plate on Voyager, which aside from the plaque everyone knows, contained a gold record with bitmap-encoded pictures documenting the earth. The book goes over each picture and the rationale behind choosing it. It is absolutely fascinating; they thought very hard about how to represent the earth, starting with a few pictures on math and number systems and then going on to pictures to be decoded properly, and on the surface was information on how to read the record. Check the book out.