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

old cruft

[spectrokid]

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....

BS.

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:BS.

[mabinogi]

The point is that the interest in reto computing is keeping the _knowledge_ required to convert the stream of data to something useful.
Things like old manuals and spec sheets that might tell you exactly what encoding is used in the data. (Since manuals actually contained real information in those days, rather than being purely a vehicle for "Screw you, don't blame us" EULAs and disclaimers)

Rubbish

[onion2k]

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.