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Retro Machines Key to Rescuing Old Data

Posted by Hemos on from the or-just-some-really-good-emulation dept.

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.'"

3 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Catweasel! by mkro · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  2. Retro Links by hedgehog2097 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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/

  3. Media Degradation Is The Issue by pandrijeczko · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    --
    Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.