Build a Cheap Media-Reading PC?

tsm_sf writes "A recent Slashdot article got me thinking about dead and dying media. I'd like to build a cheap PC with the goal of being able to read as many old formats as possible. Size and power consumption would be design considerations; priority of media formats would be primary. How would you approach such a project?"

Comments

existing pc

[spandex_panda]

what is wrong with your existing pc? what with between open office and mpd on Ubuntu ... I can read most formats!!

Re:existing pc

[ccguy]

I don't think openoffice will be very useful to read any document a 5.25" floppy, a QIC-20 tape, a IOMega drive, etc...

Anyway I don't think this guy is going to be very successful building a computer that can read everything. Some tapes need a controller that must be plugged into an ISA slot, for example.

Re:existing pc

[Anonymous Coward]

Some tapes need a controller that must be plugged into an ISA slot, for example.

Er, why couldn't he use an old Socket A or SS7 board that has ISA slots, then? He's not interested in doing computing with the thing so power (or lack pf it) doesn't matter.

Re:existing pc

[zakezuke]

I don't think openoffice will be very useful to read any document a 5.25" floppy, a QIC-20 tape, a IOMega drive, etc...

Anyway I don't think this guy is going to be very successful building a computer that can read everything. Some tapes need a controller that must be plugged into an ISA slot, for example.

Not exactly true. What you are likely thinking of are qic-02 or qic-36 tape drives where you have an isa controller. However, scsi->qic-xx controllers exist. I remember buying some PC solutions with their proprietary software and isa card just for the drive, specifically a Wangtek 5xxx series. Wangtek I know offered a drive that could write 120+megs to a DC600a tape. Very handy. However in my quest for speed and efficiency I discovered issues reading things written on Archive 5945C drives, or was it Kennedy 6500? It's hard for me to remember such details at this point but I do remember the joy of

1) Compatibility between drives
2) Compatibility between controllers
3) Compatibility between software

Come to think about it, it was about the windows 95 era that I thought it was a wise idea to ditch the whole QIC concept and go with Exabyte 8mm, or better yet CD-R via the good old HP 8200 series.

But to be fair, I'm sure I have some tape lying about off a qic-02 drive using some funky arse proprietary software.

http://www.qic.org/html/qicstan.html

God I hated that era. But I imagine you could get a few drives for each given size and get software that would read the various formats. I'm sure compression would be tricker but I'm sure it would be possible. I see this as being useful to those few bits of tape that haven't been moved yet.

Re:existing pc

[savuporo]

>>mpd on Ubuntu ... I can read most formats!!

Try UFS-formatted compactflash ..

Re:existing pc

[PopeRatzo]

a drive that could write 120+megs to a DC600a tape.

Hey! I could store 1/6 of an xvid movie on that.

Re:existing pc

[zakezuke]

Hey! I could store 1/6 of an xvid movie on that.

It was 150megs, not 120 as I remembered. You have a point by today's standards it was pretty small, but by early to mid 1990 standards that's equal to 104 floppy disks. The tapes were about $10 each, or $1.00 if you were lucky. 6.6c/meg wasn't really a bad deal. There is linux support for many of these drives, good solid support but that doesn't help you out as they were often shipped with those funky arse ISA controllers and dos software. Before 2000 the respective companies maintained BBSes with free public downloads. Handy! But they used the y2k scare to ditch BBS support. I'm sure you "might" be able to access the drive in linux, but I highly doubt respective companies were consistent with their software.

Re:existing pc

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem. Learn how to roll your own kernel, weenie.

Re:existing pc

[savuporo]

Does a falling tree make a sound when nobody is listening ? Does a distro like Ubuntu remain Ubuntu when you swap out its kernel ?

Actually, just cant be arsed to recompile a kernel just to get one file off the damn card.

And btw, read-only support WAS in default Hardy but it just wouldnt work, it was easier to do it on a BSD machine.

Re:existing pc

[cayenne8]

"Does a falling tree make a sound when nobody is listening ? Does a distro like Ubuntu remain Ubuntu when you swap out its kernel ?"

Yes...the kernel in whatever form is what makes it Linux. The packaging and stuff around it makes the distro.

This brings a question to mind....I've not worked with that many distributions...slackware, Red Hat in early days and Gentoo. Do most newer distros not have your custom roll your kernel as part of the initial install of the OS?

Re:existing pc

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you need to replace the kernel? Just reconfigure the kernel sources it's using and make UFS a module, rebuild the modules and copy it over.

Re:existing pc

[ccguy]

Not exactly true. What you are likely thinking of are qic-02 or qic-36 tape drives where you have an isa controller. However, scsi->qic-xx controllers exist.

That's one example, but there are many. The OP wants to build something that can read everything, and even if he manages to build something decent, he is going to run out of slots.

Also, some stuff is not going to work in any computer you can build today, period - even if you can at least plug all the hardware. The software depends on very specific hardware, timing (such as a 8086 at 4.77 Mhz), etc.

Re:existing pc

[jabuzz]

Or you could just buy a modern motherboard with ISA slots. A bit more pricey but they do exist. You are not going to get much traction replacing that seven figure to replace production line controlled by an ISA card because the controlling computer has gone south.

Or one could buy a PCI to ISA bridge... Heck they even do USB ones if you want.

ISA is far from dead yet.

Re:existing pc

[hairyfeet]

That is why he should look in his local paper or freecycle and look for a working machine in the 233-500MHz range. I would suggest an old Dell Optiplex full tower. They had plenty of room,easy to work on,lots of slots(including ISA on the older models) and they were plentiful and reliable. After all,we are talking about old media,which is going to need old media readers. The Dells had the ease of access,reliability, and room for lots of addons in the full size tower. And today he shouldn't have any trouble finding one for cheap or free. Once he has it set up he can just stick it in a corner and check its progress every once in a while by KVMing into it.

Re:existing pc

[savuporo]

I wouldnt have a comprehensive answer, but most end-user oriented stuff that i have tried recently ( random-buntus, Mandriva, suse ) supply a few different stock builds of "blinkin-lights" kernels.

Re:existing pc

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I would not suggest a Dell Optiplex full tower. Funky Non standard shape Power supplies. They were also a maze of crazy plastic tabs that you need to press to remove some pointless part just to get at another pointless part to get to the part that blocks access to the funky isa riser that orients the cards vertically for no particular reason. Maybe some models were better. Working with a non for profit I ran into quite a few Optiplexes of that era. each one seemed to be almost completely different despite looking simuliar on the outside, and having comparable specs. But I guess the mere fact that I saw a lot of them means they sold well and lasted a while. HP's of that era are more compact and feature more screws than plastic tabs and have standard sized power supplies, but are also less reliable.

So what would I suggest? Finding a computer that works, without too much consideration for the particular make. Heck, if your worreid about reliability buy four. No one's going to offer you a guarantee on any thing that old, and they aren't particularly expensive. You can always cannibalize they identical ones when something fails.

Re:existing pc

[hairyfeet]

Actually I'd say the design of the old Dell Optiplex was one of its biggest strengths. You could get to any part of the PC without needing tools,you could slide the entire PCI/ISA card daughterboard out of the machines with a simple pull of the lever(great for changing cards) and frankly they are built like freaking tanks. And as you pointed out they made a ton of them so picking up spare would not be a problem. The case was roomy and didn't bust your knuckles like the HP Pavilions did,all around a great box for this kind of work.

Now as far as PSUs go,IIRC you could fit a Mini PSU in there(Mini-ITX? been too long since I needed a little PSU) and with a little work you could probably squeeze a full size ATX in there,but honestly I've never come across one with a dead PSU. And I have ended up with some seriously beat up Optiplex PCs,including a pair that had been left in a shed behind the shop for over a year and had wasps nest built in them. After a total cleaning they fired right up and are probably still running to this day. For the project the author is wanting a PC for the Dell Optiplex would be perfect.

Re:existing pc

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I had several PSU 's fail on them. Couldn't find a psu to replace that fit nicely in the case. They're funky. THey had special adaptations to make them fit without screws. You'd find one that was roughly the same shape and from dell, but wouldn't fit cause it didn't have the right grooves. I suggest that someone with this type of a project get two of everything for redundancy. You'd probably be fine with two optiplexes of the same exact build.

Sometimes I just wanted to do a space Odyssey style monkey beat down of those funky psu's.

Re:existing pc

[zakezuke]

That's one example, but there are many. The OP wants to build something that can read everything, and even if he manages to build something decent, he is going to run out of slots.

Also, some stuff is not going to work in any computer you can build today, period - even if you can at least plug all the hardware. The software depends on very specific hardware, timing (such as a 8086 at 4.77 Mhz), etc.

Tape drive
1) Controller
2) Drive
3) Software

In the QIC class of drives, I'm not aware of ANY that didn't use

1) QIC02/QIC036 ISA controlers
2) Scsi controlers
3) Floppy controler
4) IDE controler
5) Other (electronics parallel, game port)

I'm sure that anything in the (5) class also had something in the anything above class. I'm sure with a stack of DC-600A sized drives you could read most anything at least in terms of raw data. It's converting that raw data into something something usable that would be a real pain since this tended to be undocumented. DC-2000 sized, same issue, a stack of those too, raw read, decipher it in software.

While I agree there is a ton of stuff designed to work for a specific machine timing, I'm not aware of tape drives that had software with that issue. But I got out of the ISA controller scene in the Pentium III range, and some to think about it, by this point I just switched to a SCSI controller and used tar. What may be an issue with SCSI are drives that didn't pay well with specific chipsets. I've not seen this issue with tape, but I have seen this issue with scanners. There are a ton of scanners that hit goodwill about 5 years ago that were pretty much keyed to some Trxxxxx chipset.

But I agree that to read everything, well, that would NOT be practical. Now there probably should be a project dedicated to the universal reading of these damn tapes.

Re:existing pc

[rakslice]

My understanding is that neither USB- or PCI-to-ISA bridges are a 100% compatible solution (in terms of the communications methods supported, architecture on the host side, and timing issues). For instance, there seems to be a glut of PCI to ISA adapters that don't support DMA. If your device's needs fit within the limitations of the bridge and you have a driver for the device that will work, perhaps a driver compatibility solution for you platform included with the bridge that lets you use the original drivers for the device, then that's great. If I wanted to get a device going, and I didn't really know the details of its i/o, I'd consider buying a bridge product and trying to get it going as an experiment, but it's easy to see that as a lot of expense and trouble for a project where a $5 yard sale motherboard would get the job done quickly.

Re:existing pc

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember seeing something a few weeks ago about a ISA to USB adapter.

http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-card-ROHS-usb2isa.html

I think they sell the appropriate enclosures and supplemental power supplies as well as adapters capable of mounting multiple ISA card simultaneously.

Big long SCSI bus

[Colin Smith]

Or, several of them.

Archive format of the future:

http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/

 

Re:Big long SCSI bus

[somersault]

Reminds me of our old Office Manager. When she wanted to archive an important email, she copied the main text into Word, then printed it off before storing it in files in her desk. Rather than, you know, at least printing it out from Outlook, or freakin storing it in her personal folders like everyone else.

I wasn't aware of her weird filing system, so when she scanned in one of these emails and sent it to me as a type of 'forward' I thought she was trying to bullshit me. It clearly said at the top of the scan that it was a Word document.

The text of the message actually included something like "I have sent this email to you on 20th of Whatever" which made the whole thing look incredibly fake.

The sad thing is that it turned out it was actually a real email from her to me months before, but I had deleted and forgotten the original because it was so incredibly dumb as to be offensive to both my Inbox and my mind. The headers are there for a reason, technophobes! I don't need you to tell me the date in an email, thankyou very much.

I was relieved when she got made redundant last year. There's something about having half-wit control freaks in positions of authority that disturbs me.

Re:Big long SCSI bus

[Anonymous Coward]

Jebus.. what a waste of paper and toner..

Re:Big long SCSI bus

[martin_henry]

my favorite line from the page:

"Printed books can be now much thinner which would save a lot of trees and be very ecological. However, would require a PC to read."

Re:Big long SCSI bus

[NeilTheStupidHead]

There's something about having half-wit control freaks in positions of authority that disturbs me.

So... you don't normally deal with middle management?

Re:Big long SCSI bus

[somersault]

Well, it's a pretty small company, so often I'm dealing with the top level of management directly as I'm one of two IT staffers. Most of our management aren't actually trained as managers - they're trained as engineers or accountants, and on top of that are actually nice people!

Re:Big long SCSI bus

[Anonymous Coward]

For a second I had the cynical thought it might be an illuminated manuscript hand-written on vellum, a tried-and-true technology that has archived data for many centuries.

I wasn't far off :-)

Re:Big long SCSI bus

[NeilTheStupidHead]

Fair enough. I work in a very large organization where the majority of people have no idea what happens when they push a button on a keyboard. I had an office manager once that had index cards with stepwise instructions of everything she had to do with her computer. EVERYTHING. She had to write out a new index card every week when her password expired and she had to change it... but first she had to consult the index card that told her how to change her password. They replaced our old CRT displays with LCDs and she freaked out. The worst is that she actively refuses any attempt to explain even simple things to her, like what a right click is. It's infuriating some days.

Re:Big long SCSI bus

[CAIMLAS]

You think that's bad: an old IT manager of mine did that. Though I got sacked in this situation, because apparently the role of "system administrator" wasn't actually supposed to take initiative to solve problems which kept popping up time and time again. Apparently that's how she showed her competence to management - fixing the same damn thing, over and over.

Might also be why there were still 10-year-old "servers" kicking around.

Glad I'm not there anymore.

Re:Big long SCSI bus

[somersault]

Agreed. I was going to post another rant about this woman, she similarly just went through everything by rote instead of really trying to think what was going on and using common sense. I showed her how to insert new rows into a spreadsheet a couple of times (just right click on the rows and choose insert->new row, I mean how hard is that to remember) and she still asked me to do it for her, which was the start of me just getting really frustrated with her attitude. You can tell when someone really just is struggling to grasp a concept, or whether they're just being lazy*. The non-lazy ones will at least take the initiative to look through the menus to try to find what they need. My job covers a lot of areas, and if I had a job description it probably would include helping people out with simple issues like that, but as a result of this situation we ended up having a policy in the sales offices of employees helping each other out with simple stuff like that before I need to get involved. Funnily enough, all the workers in the engineering and finance departments never need to ask that kind of question. The country bumpkin types in our fabrication department.. well, we won't talk about that 8|

Thankfully, any new employees we've had recently have been under 30, so they already just 'get' how to use computers, having been brought up with them. Older people can of course learn too - one of our managers has done a great job picking things up - but some people just don't want to know.

*okay, some people may have real insecurities within themselves of looking inadequate when trying to learn something, or just feeling they wouldn't be able to learn, but a lot of the time it's just laziness. I don't mind if someone asks 'stupid' questions as long as they are making a genuine attempt to learn, and I have a lot of time for those people - just not ones who are basically using me as their Human-Computer Interface.

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

Well. Media reading. As in read any fileformats? or Read any physical formats as well, down to the good old 5.25" floppies.

Any small linux machine could do this. If you dont need the physical ports, check out a fit-pc(google).
Linux has dosbox which is the best dos emulator (with sound) that I have seen, and it has viewers for every media format I encountered so far.

Re:first post

[andyh-rayleigh]

down to the good old 5.25" floppies.

Only 5,25"? what about the original 8"?
(actually, it is possible to get controllers that handle all sizes of floppy:
8" SD, DD, SS DS, soft or hard sectored (but the latter may need some fancy software to decode);
5.25" SD ,DD ,HD, SS, DS (the Apple ones will also need some special software as will BBC and SWTPC);
3.5" fewer variations, but still a lot;
Two different (and incompatible) 3.25" drives;
and I think at least one format of 2.5" got released before FLASH cards took over. ... and that is only floppies - then we can go onto at least a dozen tape forms (not counting audio cassette formats):
Reel-to-reel 0.5" 7 or 9 track, NRZI or PE;
QIC in a huge number of different types;
8mm (Exabyte) in 3 versions;
and DLT and its successors (about 8 forms).

But yet hardware could still be the easy part.

Re:first post

[TapeCutter]

"...down to the good old 5.25" floppies. Any small linux machine could do this..."

Insensitive clod! - My kids are on super 8 from the 80's, now get off my lawn or I'll call homeland security and tell them about your concealed linux machine.

Re:first post

[ukemike]

What about 10" floppies? What about cassette tapes? My Atari 400 had cassette tapes. Don't forget analogue formats, 33rpm, 45rpm, 78rpm, and 16rpm audio disks. Ooh Edison cylinders, don't forget them!

Re:first post

[klubar]

You're missing lots of other formats...
-- punched paper tape (oiled and non-oiled)
-- DecTape
-- Old-style 80 MB and 300 MB CDC removable hard drives (the ones that looked like washing machines)
-- Punch cards 80 column and whatever the other format was

Re:first post

[Mr. Shiny And New]

you're being sarcastic but they have USB record players now.

Re:first post

[JimFive]

Any analog format, including that cassette, can be read via the line-in port of your soundcard. Decoding it might be an issue, but that's software. I don't know of anyone that stored digital data on Edison cylinders.
--
JimFive

Try...

[barndoor101]

a scanner

USB adapters

[name*censored*]

What's wrong with getting a commodity PC, a couple of USB hubs and as many adapters as you can lay your hands on? Most every connection I can think of has a USB adapter for it..

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

Get real. Do you think there are USB adapters for all those old tapedrives? Zipdrives? Floppy formats?

Re:USB adapters

[shotgunefx]

Exactly. I have some old 3.5HDDs that can be used with an enclosure. Requires too much power I'm guessing.

Re:USB adapters

[91degrees]

Tapedrives are usually SCSI and ZIP drives are SCSI, IDE or USB so with aUSB SCSI interface you should be able to handle them.

Re:USB adapters

[denzacar]

Look at his ID number.

USB was probably around all his life.

Re:USB adapters

[dbIII]

Get real. Do you think there are USB adapters for all those old tapedrives?

Possibly, but one thing that is definitely available is SCSI to iSCSI converters so you can put that thirty year old tape drive on a network.

There are other problems. While I have access to a tape drive that can read and write reels of tape it is a bit of a different story if the tape was actually recorded in the 1980s. There is the problem of that tapes deteriorating so it takes more skill and gear than I have to read the tapes without the magnetic material flaking off - apparently it requires a lot of mucking about with lubricant and variable speeds (don't touch that line kids). Astronomers, geophyisicists etc have a lot of old data that is worth keeping since it's difficult or impossible to obtain again.

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

tape drives probably not, for the floppies, you can get USB floppy drives in 3.5 and if you look around on ebay, some of the older USB drives (and I mean first gen, when Macs first abandoned floppies) actually had a real floppy controller in the enclosure with a usb bridge. One of those should be able to be cannibalized to make a us 5.25 floppy, though you will likely need external power, which adds another $10 to the cost. For Zip drives, they came in 3 flavors, SCSI and Serial Port (inline with your printer), both of which are available as USB adapters and IDE, for which you could use a standard IDE Hard Drive to USB adapter. Its the tape drives you will never find.

While you are considering.....Are you also forgetting old hard drive types. Do you need to read MFM drives? RLL? or ARLL?

Re:USB adapters

[bwcbwc]

Do you have a USB 8" floppy drive (or even 5 1/4") on hand? Not to mention things like 9-track tape, or punch cards.

tsb_sf isn't clear enough about how far back he wants to go with this. I'd say his best bet is a combination of SCSI, firewire and USB connections, but there's a good chance he won't be able to interface any of the truly ancient stuff. With SCSI and USB (and a MB that still has a floppy connector), he can cover:
-Most QIC-xx tape formats
-5.25 and 3.5" floppies, all formats.
-CD/DVD/Blu-ray and their relatives.
-Hard drives from just about any small to mid-range server, assuming he has the file-system drivers.
-Memory cards of all types.
-Old iOmega and Syquest cartridge drives (and others of that ilk).
-DAT tape backups.
If he's lucky, he might be able to find SCSI 9-track tape drives and perhaps 8" floppy, too. But AFAIK the supply of these things gave out sometime during Web 1.0.

Once you have the device channels, the rest of the job is accumulating the hardware and device drivers. Finding 32-bit Windows device drivers for a lot of these will be challenging, to say the least. You'll probably need a multi-boot system with BSD/Linux, Win 95, and Win XP. OS/2 might help too.

Start with the oldest stuff first, since that is what will disappear first. Say anything from before 1990.

You'll also need data recovery software, since a lot of the old magnetic media will have decayed into unusability.

Re:USB adapters

[BotnetZombie]

I'm (almost) as old as McCain and have a much higher ID number than the USB dude, you insensitive clod!

Re:USB adapters

[name*censored*]

Do you really think people are joining slashdot when they're 11? (2008-1995 - ~2 years of this account). I'm not even close to 13.

Ignoring the fact that GP is wrong - I happen to own both a USB floppy drive and a USB Zip drive (via adapter), why would my age necessarily invalidate my point? There _ARE_ USB adapters for pretty much everything, 5.25" floppies can be hacked using the guts of a 3.5" floppy drive (same connections), and short of using 2 computers (one legacy and one modern), that's pretty much the best way to do it. As previously pointed out, you can get adapters for most everything, so if it was available in an external format back when you were merely quite old, it'll be available by daisy-chaining adapters now.

Re:USB adapters

[trellick]

USB...what's that?

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaaha...

"What's a floppy?"

~Born in '86. What's it to ya?

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

Said the person with a UID 700 higher.

Re:USB adapters

[Metaphorically]

Okay, get me an adapter for my Amiga 3 1/2" drive and another one for my Commodore 1571 5.25" floppy drive.

Re:USB adapters

[gravis777]

Great. So how do you propose I handle an MFM drive? Last I checked, you needed an MFM controller, not just the right kind of connector.

I think the question will most likely be what can be built to handle the most number of controller cards, and so forth. You will probably also need to dual, triple,or possibly quad-boot the PC, because some of the drivers are DOS, some are Windows 3, some are 95, some may be OS/2, etc. Now, I am sure someone is going to bring up the concept of virtual machines, so let me put a stop to that right here - for a virtual machine to talk to hardware on your existing machine, you must have the driver installed on the existing machine, and then the virtual software must allow the virtual OS to talk to the real hardware. Defeats the purpose.

I truthfully doubt that you are going to be able to find a one-machine solution. You will not have enough ISA and PCI slots, you will run out of IRQs and addresses, you will have hardware conflicting with each other, and software trying to access devices that it should not be accessing, possibly corrupting data. Just go out and pick up some old 286s and 386s (places are usually willing to just give these away), throw your controller cards in them, and just accept the fact that you are going to have to use multiple machines.

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

here's how to connect your 1541
http://www.rootlabs.net/~nate/c64/x1541.html

I know it can be done as I used to have one connected to my computer and used it with an emulator

and here
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=39566
is a thread discussing reading amiga floppies on a standard PC floppy drive

You're welcome

Re:USB adapters

[91degrees]

Great. So how do you propose I handle an MFM drive? Last I checked, you needed an MFM controller, not just the right kind of connector.

True but you can get adapter circuitry that makes them look like SCSI devices. Or are they the other way round?

I truthfully doubt that you are going to be able to find a one-machine solution. You will not have enough ISA and PCI slots

IRQs will be a problem. PCI is too modern to be an issue. There aren't any interfaces that are only available in PCI format except USB. You'll want a machine with as few PCI and as many ISA slots as possible. I can't imagine there's any hardware that's OS/2 only. Very little that's Windows 3.1 only as well. Windows 95 had pretty good backward compatibility in this respect.

A bigger problem will older, non-PC formats. Early macs had variable speed drives. Amigas had a custom disk format that PC drives can't read. The BBC experimented with a laserdisc based format. Some early CD ROM experiments used bizarre formats that could be decoded but would need some data format information, or at least a crib.

Re:USB adapters

[jmitchel!jmitchel.co]

With a bit of patience and the pin-outs you could probably drive a 5.25" or 8" floppy with your USB floppy controller and a bit of hacking. The 5.25" was more-or-less pin-for-pin compatible with the 3.5" drives. And I'm pretty sure that the standard 5.25" HD drives were nearly electrically compatible with the 8" drives. I had a set of simple instructions to make a cable to hook a 5.25" drive to an 8" controller at one point (or was it vice versa) back in the days of Linux infancy. I never did try it - notgiveadamn got the best of me.

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been my experience older people (even programmers) join Slashdot later. They still got their intellectual stimulation from radio talk shows snicker.

Re:USB adapters

[denzacar]

Hey, its not my fault you were born so early and discovered interweb so late.

I guess its a trade off for all those years of AIDS-less sex.

Re:USB adapters

[denzacar]

It was joke. You know.. a funny.

See... Its a running joke on slashdot to point out other people's high slashdot ID numbers while loudly exclaiming "Ha-HA!" in a Nelson Muntz manner.
Then, just as you point out the slashdotter with 7-digit (or close) ID, a 5 or 4 digit ID slashdotter comes along and points at you.
And so on, and so forth, all the way to the 1-3 digit IDs.
Using the old geezer talk (Get off my lawn!) is often a part of the ritual.

You should have picked up on that one by now during those 2 years.

 
As for your question...
I was always under the impression that most people join slashdot at around nine, and leave for more important things couple of years later - when they discover girls.
OK, OK... when they discover porn.

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

United States of Bmerica.

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

Zip drives? Yes. I actually own a USB Zip drive.

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

i have a USB zip drive, so yeah, i'm pretty sure that's not a problem.

Re:USB adapters

[HTH NE1]

ZIP drives are SCSI, IDE or USB so with aUSB SCSI interface you should be able to handle them.

Provided you can find a ZIP drive that hasn't clicked itself to death.

(I still have a functioning JAZ drive.)

Re:USB adapters

[Metaphorically]

Fist off, the post I'm replying to says

There _ARE_ USB adapters for pretty much everything

Neither of the links you gave are even close to proving with that statement.

Second, the Amiga thread doesn't have any... conclusion. I've only looked in to hooking up the Amiga drive so far and I've read that exact same thread already.

My reply here was just to point out that there are not usb adapters for pretty much everything.

Re:USB adapters

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Do you think there are USB adapters for all those old tapedrives? Zipdrives? Floppy formats?

I have USB zip and floppy (3.5) drives.

Re:USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at his ID number.

USB was probably around all his life.

Says the man with the higher UID

Re:USB adapters

[Deep Penguin]

Since the OP merely mentioned "old formats", it would, perhaps, be helpful for the OP to have mentioned a sampling of what sorts of media formats he was interested in.

I am not aware of any USB-attached 5.25" or 8" drives on the market, and that is only two of the dominant physical formats of the past 30 years. Within that scope alone, there are many, many logical formats, FM, MFM, and GCR being the most common encoding methods, not to mention a myriad of filesystems. It's difficult (impossible?) to find FM support for any commodity motherboard with an onboard floppy controller. It's much simpler if you are allowed to reach back to the ISA days and select a suitable floppy controller card.

It's possible to cobble up an ISA PC that can support a wide variety of floppy media, but there were so many tricky ways of talking to floppies in the pre-IBM-PC era that it would be a challenge to support more than 95% of all floppy formats without something like a Catweasel controller (Amiga, Mac 400K/800K, Commodore 2040/4040/2031/1541/1571/8050/8250/etc/etc)

So, again, depending on how "old" one cares to get, there are many varieties of removable 14"-diameter hard drive media that are very, very difficult to read without contemporary CPUs and controllers - just in the DEC line alone, there's RK01, RK05, RL01, and RL02 single-platter media; RK06 and RK07 double-platter media; RM03, RM05, RP04, RP06, RA60, and more, multi-platter media; and that's not counting smaller removable media (RC25) or 3rd-party disks that were common in the day.

1/2" magtape has fewer variations - 9-track being the most common for the 1980s and beyond (in various densities from 800 bpi to 6250 bpi), but 7-track was once dominant, and now difficult to find working transports for. Fortunately, it's still somewhat easy to find a SCSI-interfaced 9-track drive that reads/writes 1600 and 6250 bpi. 800 bpi support is somewhat rarer.

Fortunately, papertape and punched cards aren't as diverse as disk packs - but there's 5-level and 8-level 1" papertape, and several varieties of punched card (both number and shape of the punched holes as well as character set, but at least character set variations can be handled in software once you get the pattern of the punched holes, however many columns, into memory).

And, yes, in case you were wondering, I can read and write most of the formats I've described, though not with PC hardware.

Re:USB adapters

[toddestan]

Provided you can find a ZIP drive that hasn't clicked itself to death.

Go find some office where the Zip drive was standard equipment on every computer, but no one ever used them for anything. I've seen a few. Hundreds of zip drives, only a few ever actually ever saw a zip disk. Only problem is that most of the machines from that era have probably been retired by now and scrapped(*), so you'll have to poke around in some dusty closets to find ones that are left.

(*) Their notorious unreliability may help you here. As the first of the Zip-equipped PCs were retired, prudent IT guys would remove the working Zip drives to have spares for the few machines where they were used. I've seen some impressive stacks of lightly used Zip drives in some storerooms.

Re:USB adapters

[anjrober]

holy shit...are the slashdot IDs really in the millions...oh my, we are old...i thought i was late to the game...

Re:USB adapters

[whit3]

Alas, USB cannot keep up with wide/fast SCSI (required for DDS3 and DDS4
tape drives), and doesn't have enough power for high voltage differential
at all. You need two or more SCSI interfaces, just to cover the signaling
range (there are low-voltage-differential interfaces that autoswitch to the
older single-ended standard, but not to high-voltage-differential).

But that's not all: the original PC had cassette interface (and your audio card
can't completely replace that, there's no motor control wire in an audio card).
Is there a cassette/USB dongle available? Anywhere?

Re:USB adapters

[tsm_sf]

You'll also need data recovery software, since a lot of the old magnetic media will have decayed into unusability.

Aha, that was an area I had not considered and an interesting subject in itself. Thanks!

how old is old?

[Anonymous Coward]

9-track tape? Hollerith cards? You have to specify a cutoff point.

Step One

[Anonymous Coward]

Post a question to Ask Slashdot.

Get busy with eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

Get yourself a big tower case and one of each of these: 5.25" floppydrive, Zip-drive, Travan tape-reader, Creative tape-drive, DAT tapedrive, single speed cd-rom (for these *really* pesky cd's), dvd+/-RW. And a 77-in-1 flashmemory readers.

Then, make sure you have a parallel port, a serial port and a game port (there is actually backup media that connects to the game port, what where they thinking).

After the hardware, start with software: DOS, Win'98se, Win2000, WinXP at least. Then Linux (drivers for almost any filing system) and, i kid you not, FreeBSD (very good drivers for obscure hardware, especially backup hardware).

That's a start, at least.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Super Jamie]

I can't believe parent is modded 0. Funny, if not Informative!

Re:Get busy with eBay

[zakezuke]

game port (there is actually backup media that connects to the game port, what where they thinking)

I can't say I've seen the gameport used that way, but I can somewhat imagine why.

On the PC, there was IRQ hell. You have the serial ports at 3 and 4, IIRC lpt1: was 7, and IRQ 5 was that wonderful general purpose one that anything you wanted to add was set to. The game port, which doubled as a Midi port, was something that could be had cheaply, that didn't really add to the IRQ hell as it was the standard on sound cards.

But what were they thinking? They were likely thinking it was cheap.

Gawd how I hated that age.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[ConanG]

Don't forget the 3.5" floppy drive!

Instead of a Travan drive, I would get an Iomega Ditto 3200 (or 2GB) and Ditto Max (or Max Professional). The combo would be compatible with far more Travan-style tapes than any Travan drive (QIC, Travan, and Ditto drives).

There's also the Iomega Jaz, Bernoulli, Rev, and Orb removable drives.

For Data8 format (8mm helical scan tapes), the combo of the Mammoth LT and Mammoth 2 will give you at least read access to the various capacity tapes.

There are soooo many older formats, it's nigh impossible to be able to read them all.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get out the dust rag. I think I have most if not all of that in my attic. Now, how do I get it into my Compaq luggable?

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Lord_Breetai]

Not to mention the various types of magneto-optical media.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[ConanG]

I thought about that. The thing is, the original question states this is primarily for older media. Magneto-optical is generally fairly recent.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[OolimPhon]

Fairly. I remember using magneto-optical disks in around 1993-1994. They were a pig, as well. Lived in their own caddies that were almost, but not quite dissimilar to standard CD caddies, so you couldn't share the drives... and the software! I was quite glad when someone stole the drive and the disks.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[eggoeater]

You'll also need a food dehydrator.
Think I'm kidding?
It's commonly used in the recording industry to get reel-to-reel tape to "re-adhere" the magnetic coating to the plastic.
After about 10 years, and certainly after 20, the tape becomes brittle and the magnetic material just flakes off.
I have read several articles (from the early 90's when I was a sound engineer) about how a food dehydrator like this one is perfect for treating the tape, since the reels fit right inside it.
I think you leave it in for about 24 hours and the tape comes out like new, and the temperature is low enough not to damage the magnetic layer.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[NJRoadfan]

Don't forget SCSI. Just about every removable media drive was commonly available in classic parallel SCSI. (except for LS-120, but EIDE is common enough) At the computer shop I used to work at we had a media machine. Had a Zip, Jaz, EZFlyer, Syquest Sparq, LS-120, 5.25", Bernoulli, and some tape drive. I think we had a Floptical drive somewhere, along with a big old classic Syquest drive for their 44/88MB carts.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Pharmboy]

After the hardware, start with software: DOS, Win'98se, Win2000, WinXP at least. Then Linux (drivers for almost any filing system) and, i kid you not, FreeBSD (very good drivers for obscure hardware, especially backup hardware).

you can install all the operating systems as virtual machines, but what would you use as the primary OS?

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

Iomega Jaz, Bernoulli, Rev, and Orb removable drives

God I remember format hell when I worked in printing back in the day, every designer handed you a different format, in the days before cheap CD-R and DVD-R. So, dredging up more old memories, don't forget the myriad SyQuest Formats.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget an ls120 drive!

On the upside, you can probably get all this junk on ebay for the cost of shipping.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Soruk]

Don't forget the video capture card, and VHS, V2000 and Betamax video machines, in both PAL and NTSC format. (Forget the ones that can play out NTSC tapes on PAL systems, they screw with the picture due to the line count and frame rate.)

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Kalvos]

You're confusing two problems. The tape flake-off problem is not cured by baking; it can even be made worse. I've never found a proper cure for it, so I do those transfers with a modified machine with extra-gentle handling.

The gummy tape (1980s) is cured by baking -- 36 hours minimum, rotations every two hours, then cooling for 4 hours. That's after fixing splices, removing old splices, cleaning mold, etc., and gentle winding inverted (so the slurry doesn't come off on the guides). It lasts about a week, time enough for transfer.

Dennis

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, how do I read this set of punched cards?

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Soruk]

Trust me to forget to explain why. Before I get modded offtopic I should point out this is all for the Danmere Backer.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[gEvil (beta)]

Yep. The "tape baking" process is basically to get the tape in a "good enough" state so that you can then transfer the contents to another storage medium.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[LWATCDR]

virtual machines may not cut it. A lot of those devices need to bang the bits to work and VM don't let you get down to that level... With good reason.
You will need to boot from each of them probably.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Amazing Quantum Man]

You forgot all the various flavors of QIC (DC-150, DC-300, DC-600, DC-1000). Tandberg had a fairly nice SCSI DC-1000 back in the day.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget a SyQuest drive. The 200MB drive will use the 88 and 44MB carts. And the 270MB drive will use the 135 MB carts. And the 1.5GB drive... oh forget it.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[gooneybird]

"Get yourself a big tower case" and you can call it: "The Tower of Babel"

Re:Get busy with eBay

[hurfy]

I did a travan-3 tape drive with windows XP altho it wasn't very happy about it. There are no drivers for floppy based tape drive but if you load up enough drivers for either older windows and/or parallel port drivers it will work eventually.

If anyone can convince XP to use a 360k floppy give me a yell :(

I ended up with 3 computers covering stuff back to the above mentioned 120MB tape drives, the travan-3 tape drive, syquest and iomega drives and a newer DDS4 tape drive as well as MFM HD and 360k floppy.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Artifakt]

They were thinking that a lot of businesses had bought the machines, and weren't using the game ports for gaming, so they would welcome devices that put those ports to use. If you've ever seen pics of a C-64SX, the 23 pound 'portable' computer that was shown in the ads being carried by a guy in a gray suit getting off a learjet, you'll understand just what they thought was the market.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[PitaBred]

Don't get a single-speed CD drive. The lasers on those are woefully underpowered, and can't read rewritable or recordable discs properly. You can generally use software to slow down the CD read speed if you need to. I know it's an option in the BIOS of my T61, too.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

This is mostly used in audio-recording,
and then on a relatively small set off Ampex tapes
made in a certain period, that have problems with their bonding layer.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[fat_mike]

The sad thing is that I actually have all of those plus a few others.

MFM Controller - Check
RLL - Check
Actually working parallel and usb Zip drives - Check * 23
Parallel Iomega Taravan drive - Check * 8 tapes of late 80's early 90's porn
All ISA motherboard - Check, Check & Check

Monster giant mammoth case that has 7 5.25" drive bays - Check

I think I failed my New Year's Resolution from 1997 to stop being a pack rat.

Re:Get busy with eBay

[zakezuke]

They were thinking that a lot of businesses had bought the machines, and weren't using the game ports for gaming, so they would welcome devices that put those ports to use. If you've ever seen pics of a C-64SX, the 23 pound 'portable' computer that was shown in the ads being carried by a guy in a gray suit getting off a learjet, you'll understand just what they thought was the market.

Except for one thing. If a businessman bought a PC, what were the odds it had a gameport to spare before the Pentium era? My memory is a little bit fuzzy about that time period regarding the game port since, well, mine came on a soundcard, which is exactly the sort of thing that would be omitted from a business machine until, well, about 1996 or so I'd guess.

I'm not sure when gameports became stock on PCs. I found it to be rather useless actually since any arcade game I could use the keyboard or a mouse. This is likely why I never noticed if a given motherboard had a gameport header when it became the norm to most the IO to the motherboard. I kind of noticed DA-15 cutouts on some cases, but this was not the norm.

Consider Macs...

[rtfa-troll]

I guess that you probably don't want to build around a Macintosh heart since it's probably easiest to get interesting older devices for the PC architecture. However, there's a whole set of interesting media related to the apple 3.5" floppies which used variable angular density of bits to achieve more even linear density (in other words, more bits on the outer tracks, less on the inner tracks). This needs special hardware and I think only some PC drives could possibly support reading this. This is, of course, a bit sick but not as bad as Apple II gaming media where you actually have to be able to load bits of the device driver from the disk as you go along. In a primitive form of Digital Restrictions Management, they used to stop the drive motor and continue to reaad as they went along.

Later apple media 3.5" Floppy was mostly 1.44Mb standard.

Re:Consider Macs...

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Old Apple variable-speed floppies. 400K single-sided, 800K double-sided. Vs. 360K and 720K for single-speed PC floppies.

The original 1984 Mac and the slightly later 1985 Mac 512 used 400K drives. With the 1986 introduction of the Mac Plus, the drives went to 800K. 1.44 Meg floppies were probably around 1988, introduced in the Mac IIx.

Two file-system possibilities: the original MFS (Macintosh File System) and the later HFS (Hierarchical File System). It is likely that HFS was not supported on the 400K drives.

All of this is from memory, and I'm too lazy to double-check. Correct me if I'm wrong....

Re:Consider Macs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing wrong with PC drives. It was the standard PC floppy controller that was short on IQ.

Get a CatWeasel, and you can read pretty much any 3.5" / 5 1/4" disk format there is.

Over 5000 pages per gigabyte of data

[Joce640k]

Sounds like a winner to me!

A backup of my PC will only be about five million pages or so.

If the disk ever goes down then rescanning the pages will be a doddle.

Re:Over 5000 pages per gigabyte of data

[Anonymous Coward]

13.4 Million Pages for me so far, assuming that there is no compression that can be achieved by stuffing it into a tarball and zipping it.

I don't think any scanner could survive that. Not to mention that it would totally crush the document feeder :D.

Re:Over 5000 pages per gigabyte of data

[bigjarom]

Hey hey hey, you're forgetting that you can print on both sides of the paper!
2,500 sheets of paper is only like 2 feet high. What's the problem?

Re:Over 5000 pages per gigabyte of data

[stonedcat]

Better use cover or card stock, otherwise you'll notice a large bit of data corruption on rescan. :p

(I'm quite sure you were joking, but hey what the hell can it hurt)

Re:Over 5000 pages per gigabyte of data

[beatle11]

Yeah...obviously this would need to be improved to be practical. But its cool none the less.

Re:Over 5000 pages per gigabyte of data

[toddestan]

I still found all that paper took up too much room. So I ended up scanning everything into the computer and burning it to DVD :)

Get specific

[Anonymous Coward]

What media do you find a challenge? Brevity can be a virtue but your submission reads like "do my homework for me." Kindly post the range of your question and initial findings.

Ports, ports, and more ports.

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably want a motherboard wit as many PCI slots as possible. Depending on your needs, you might even need to find a motherboard that has one of those rogue ISA slots. I'd browse around ebay and geeks.com to look for such gnarly old hardware. If you could find a motherboard that had

A quick google found this:
Gigabyte Ga-6Vtxea
Gigabyte Ga-6Vtxea ; Via 694T , On-Board Ac97 Audio , Ata100 ; 3X 168Pin Dimm, 5X Pci, 1X Isa, 1X Agp, 1 X Amr

That would be right up your alley. It probably has serial ports as well. Wow, it's pretty: image

They don't make them like that anymore.

From there, get one PCI card with USB support, get a/multiple usb hubs... grab some parallel and/or serial to usb adaptors.

Don't forget to track down a scsi card for one of the pci slots, among other random interface cards.

Re:Ports, ports, and more ports.

[paganizer]

I keep a Gigabyte GA7IXE for this purpose; it's got a Slot-A 700 Mghz T-bird & 512mb of ram, a Adaptec 2940 SCSI card, a ISA Soundblaster AWE64 gold (the best frakking sound card ever made, BTW, and has hook ups for the old proprietary CD formats), and I keep a box of ISA cards sat next to it that I've collected over the last 18 years, like MFM & RLL controllers, ARCnet cards, TCNS cards.. it's a big box. I used to keep a 486DX4-160 with VLB (and EISA) up and running, but it's been probably 5 years since I had a VLB problem come up; I gave it to a friend of mine for a DOS gaming platform.
I used to keep a microchannel machine around, I think I actually misplaced it, I don't remember what happened to it.

Re:Ports, ports, and more ports.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-card-ROHS-usb2isa.html

Re:Ports, ports, and more ports.

[Skater]

He should contact me - I have plenty of motherboards laying around, including a 386SX, a 486, a couple Pentiums, etc. Most of these probably work (or at least did when I pulled them out of the computer). Some have that wonderful VESA Local Bus port!

There is plenty of other hardware, too - a Soundblaster Pro 2 comes to mind, for example. I have a QIC-02 tape drive, controller board, ribbon cable, and a couple tapes (at least I think it's QIC-02). Lots of crap...err, vintage hardware... laying around.

Re:Ports, ports, and more ports.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get an USB2.0 to ISA adaptor...

http://www.arstech.com/item-USB-2-0-to-ISA-card-ROHS-usb2isa.html

To plug an ISA card into a USB socket.

Re:Ports, ports, and more ports.

[Reziac]

I have a closetful of such stuff... one of the problems I've run into with old small HDs, is that newer mobos won't recognise them at all. So if you need to mess with old storage, it doesn't hurt to keep that old 386 board, after all it doesn't eat much.

One problem I've run into, is that VLB stuff that sits around doing nothing... DIES. It was working when it went into The Closet, but is dead as a doornail next time I try to use it. I've had this happen enough times that I've lost all faith in old VLB stuff. :(

Oddity that came my way... a VLB SCSI card. Only one I've ever seen!

Re:Ports, ports, and more ports.

[Reziac]

Me too.. the most useless of which is a 10mb reel-type tape backup. It powers on, so I presume it still works.

Trouble is, I just hate to throw away working hardware, even if it's older than dirt. So I have an unghodly pile of useless shit.

What I really want is a time machine... I've got a boxful of old RAM that was worth about $15,000 .... just 15 years ago!

Re:Ports, ports, and more ports.

[paganizer]

VLB SCSI? wow.
Yeah, I had a boatload of VLB IDE cards left over from my retail biz when it closed; I had to try 6 or 7 before I found one that worked, just 3 years later.
Sort of puzzled me because they didn't appear shoddy or look like they had cheap components.

Re:Ports, ports, and more ports.

[toddestan]

Gigabyte Ga-6Vtxea

Ugh. A VIA chipset from that era is going to be flakey and won't like many PCI devices or loading up the PCI bus. A Gigabyte board from that era will almost certainly be suffering from the bad caps problem. I would avoid that models like that if at all possible.

You're best bet would probably be a Slot 1 Pentium II board with plenty of slots available. I have a good one here - a Tyan S1680 from 1997. Baby AT format with 5 PCI slots and 4 ISA slots, 512MB of Ram in eight 64MB ECC 72 Pin simms (that must have cost a small fortune back in the day!), and a 300Mhz PII processor. Enough power to run a modern Linux distro or Windows XP (slowly, but it'll work good enough for what you want), but also old enough that it'll run Dos/Windows 3.1/Windows 95/NT4 and there should be drivers for it.

Wrong end of the stick

[digipres]

Usually to read old media, you wouldn't start by building a PC. The first thing is the hardware that works with the media, for example a reel to reel tape drive, 8, 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 inch floppy drive, tape drive for old cartridge tape formats etc. Then you look at the interface needed to work that old hardware, then you look at what computer you need to host that interface, then an operating system, then the tools needed to get to and make sense of the data.

Luckily the OS part is pretty easy. Linux has support for all sorts of weird and wonderful interfaces right out of the box. It's also usually packaged with all manner of powerful tools good for getting data off old media.

It's getting old hardware to actually work that'll challenge you.

Re:Wrong end of the stick

[zwei2stein]

It's getting old hardware that'll challenge you.

It requires extensive scouting for parts that actually work, and obtaining them.

And when you get it and make sense of data, you would want to transfer it somewhere: you will end-up leapfrogging it trough couple of systems each decade apart from other unless you can interface everything with your target system (either not option or you would miss some hardware).

Definitely say good-bye to single, power efficient machine and say hi to couple of hard to maintain dinosaurs.

Re:Wrong end of the stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Too true. The process usually comes down to finding some obsolete gear on ebay to read the old media, then transferring it to the modern world via serial connection. Of course, if the old gear doesn't have a serial port or terminal software then you're in for some heavy lifting :)

Re:Wrong end of the stick

[dbIII]

It requires extensive scouting for parts that actually work, and obtaining them.

Anyone want an IBM3490E-C11 tape drive with a minor intermittant fault? Bring your own forklift and you might be able to have it - and unfortunately it's a realatively modern bit of gear and some of the older stuff was bigger. Too big to move so it has become a table to put the other drives that actually work on top of it. Some sought after obsolete gear will even cost far more than the overpriced cost the things originally sold for - for instance the compatible Fujitsu drive that is actually smaller than the computer you attach it to instead of the older IBM one best used to anchor fishing trawlers. Even replacement parts can cost more than decent laptops.

Re:Wrong end of the stick

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to correct your slashdot stereotypes. Old P3 class machines use less power. My celeron 1.3GHz machine uses around 60W at full load. Also older graphic card use much less power. Some of them even have passive heatsinks.

It is not like you can play games or run computational intensive stuff on it.

Re:Wrong end of the stick

[Metaphorically]

I actually started digging around just last week for a way to get my data off my old Amiga and Commodore 128 disks.

For the Amiga I turned up this gem. It's basically instructions to build a piece of hardware that will plug the Amiga floppy drive's (23-pin?) connector in to a parallel port. If you still have a parallel port.

So like you said, I'd better hope that old floppy drive still works. If it does though, then I can rely on the huge processing power and storage increases since Amiga's heyday to pack off all those old disk images and fire up the emulator.

The interesting conclusion, to me, is that if I'd tried to copy these disks over shortly after retiring that old computer, the hardware interface would be easier but the disk images would have been large and unwieldy compared to hard drives available at the time. And there'd be no way to use the files because there wasn't a fast emulator available.

Re:Wrong end of the stick

[Anonymous Coward]

RS-232-C is your friend. Standardized in 1969, and there are still new devices that use it. Almost every computer ever mad has an interface available and you can hook two computers together by crossing two wires on the cable. No need to leapfrog anything made after 1969.

Re:Wrong end of the stick

[tsm_sf]

Definitely say good-bye to single, power efficient machine and say hi to couple of hard to maintain dinosaurs.

Yeah that was pretty much the point of my post. It's why I asked Slashdot instead of Google. It's an interesting problem, especially for a hobbyist without any external funding.

Prepare for damaged media

[Anonymous Coward]

Expect all old media to contain lots of errors, and expect media readers to die. I would focus on migrating from old media to hard-disk based storage since old floppys, tapes and CDs have a limited lifespan. I would also have multiple readers for the same format since a CD that doesn't work in one reader might work in another.

I personally would go for a bigtower with multiple 5.25" and 3.5" floppy readers, CD-rom reader, a memory card reader, dvd/blueray and HD-DVD reader and 2 x 1 TB Harddrives in mirror raid to ensure that no migrated data is lost.

Some media might be unreadable my modern OS:s. Equip the machine with enough memory to run virtual machines which are given direct access to the media readers. If you need DOS to read a diskette, boot the DOS vm.

Re:Prepare for damaged media

[value_added]

and 2 x 1 TB Harddrives in mirror raid to ensure that no migrated data is lost.

The triumph of optimism over experience, it seems. Allow me to rephrase the above to something more meaningful:

and 2 x 1 TB harddrives in mirror raid to protect against drive failure. How to backup that 1TB of data will be answered in a future installment of Ask Slashdot.

Re:Prepare for damaged media

[mapsjanhere]

well, you could put it all back on the 1,000,000 floppies you needed to read for the 1 TB data ...

Re:Prepare for damaged media

[jedidiah]

A collection of cast off disks of recent vintage will be more than adequate.

Get a USB chassis for each or just have one.

Copy the data as many times as you feel comfortable.

Anything past the turn of the century will be big enough to hold ALL your data.

You could also just buy multiple new drives (not necessarily the largest) and
still end up with the same level of redundancy.

Then there's optical media. 4G is probably also large enough for everything you have in in ancient media formats.

A decade or 2 will really open up the possibilities.

Re:Prepare for damaged media

[toddestan]

and 2 x 1 TB harddrives in mirror raid to protect against drive failure. How to backup that 1TB of data will be answered in a future installment of Ask Slashdot.

That's easy. Get another 1TB drive in an external enclosure. Copy everything from the tower to the external drive. If the data is particularly valuable to you, consider buying several and stashing in multiple locations.

Of course, 1TB may be massive overkill. Most of these storage mediums are only going to have a few hundreds of kilobytes to a few MB of data each. Likely you'll only have a few GB of data max when all is said and done so you'll easily be able to make lots of copies of it on multiple media formats to insure it'll be safe.

Definitely USB adapters

[MaxToTheMax]

You don't really even need a different PC specifically for the project. Get two USB hubs, that's only two slots and it'll give you eight different drives. Get a 5.5 inch USB floppy drive. Get an IDE a LS240 Superdisk and put it in a USB enclosure (that'll take care of 3.5 inch floppies and Superdisks all in one go.) Get a USB zip drive. Get a tape backup drive (which are still being made, you can get 8 terabyte ones which take three days each to format.) And for the truly retro touch, get a paper-tape reader (I think you'll have to settle for getting that one in a serial port.)

Re:Definitely USB adapters

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a 5.5 inch USB floppy drive.

5.5" floppy? Man, that's some obscure kit!

Seriously though, you're not going to find USB-capable interfaces for most of the old obscure stuff.

Re:Definitely USB adapters

[MaxToTheMax]

Blah, I meant 5.25 inch. http://www.comp-u-shop.com/servlet/the-35659/Hi-dsh-Speed-USB-9-dsh-in-dsh-1-R-fdsh-W/Detail Also you should get an 8 inch one. (Can't seem to find one but if you look hard enough it'll turn up.) Finally, the tape backup: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=USB+tape+backup&oe=UTF-8&cid=12430681428774783414#ps-sellers Try not to fire all these up at once.

Re:Definitely USB adapters

[toddestan]

Actually, that's a USB 3.5" floppy drive with an adaptor to fit in a 5.25" bay. I have yet to see an actual USB 5.25" floppy, which is kind of surprising as there is some demand for one. I've heard that you can build one as some USB 3.5" models are simply a USB to FDC bridge with a standard 3.5" floppy drive inside, but I haven't seen one working yet.

popcorn

[Anonymous Coward]

popcorn hour...
http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/

Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[david in brasil]

8-inch reel to reel, 8 inch floppies, cassettes...You're gonna need some large reels to read some of the formats that I have around. I haven't played the Space Invaders game from my TRS-80 cassettes in 20 years.

Re:Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[greenguy]

That's nothing. Wait 'til they get to the wax cylinders and player-piano sheets I have.

Re:Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[ThreeGigs]

You jest, but didn't you ever type in a whole program that was printed in a magazine?

Re:Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[ConanG]

Just don't do what this guy did!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Noqcu3O7ojg

Re:Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[aurispector]

I still have clay cuneiform pictogram tablets and it pisses me off that nobody supports the format.

Re:Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[Skater]

YES! Then spent hours looking for my typos, then hours more fixing the bugs introduced when they printed them in the magazines!

Re:Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[Anonymous Coward]

Several. The ones that were in BASIC weren't bad, but I remember at least one that was page upon page of hex. That took several days just to discover that the game actually sucked.

Re:Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[Kalvos]

Oh, yeah. And the Stringy-Floppy. Back in 1981, I co-designed the hardware and software for an OSI version of this beast. And don't forget 8-tracks. Really. What was I thinking?

Dennis

Re:Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[ksheer]

i;ve got an old (audio) tape reader, which i used to load games to my C64 when i was a kid... any1 want i?

Re:Super-8, 4-track and 8-track

[Artifakt]

Be careful, I understand that some of those are infected with Snowcrash.

Mplayer on openpandora

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

www.openpandora.com size & power usage are guaranteed to be tiny. Get a usb floppy drive reader if you need it, it will work.

Re:Mplayer on openpandora

[GigaplexNZ]

Wrong kind of media.

Don't forget an old soundblaster card or similar.

[GrpA]

Something with basic I/O sampling so you can read all those old Audio Cassettes... Amstrad, C64, Sinclair, MSX, Oric, Ti99-4A, JR-100, Vic-20, BBC etc.

I sometimes wonder what I would make of the old things I used to write and do on those old systems...

GrpA

Might be easier to start with an older PC

[DeadlyEmbrace]

Depending on how old you want to go with the interfaces, it may be easier to start with an older ISA bus based PC and adapt new technology to it. The older could handle 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 media already built in. Going to card reader style input could be configured to a serial or parallel port. For tape drive interfaces there were a number of special PC boards on the market 20 years ago to interface PC's to reel-to-reel drives. Then you would need to add an interface between the older bus structure and the USB to open up remaining devices.

cant resist

[RuBLed]

a time machine

Re:cant resist

[MrNaz]

Of course, when you use it be sure to spend ages trolling Internet forums. I know that's what *I'd* do if the Air Force's advanced research projects department gave me a time machine to play with.

That being said, people who spend ages arguing the point about whether or not that was a legitimate time traveler have totally missed the point of what he was saying; Stop and think about where we as a society are going.

Re:cant resist

[ciderVisor]

a tyme masheen

That ride sucks !

Re:cant resist

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm you from the future. They did. You are. All ACs are actually registered users from the future who have nothing better to do.

Re:cant resist

[Noroimusha]

a tyme masheen

That ride sucks !

mod him up!!! extremely funny

Re:cant resist

[geekboy642]

You fool! Don't you know better than to actually announce our meddling in the time stream? It's bad enough simply being here, but actually confessing to it? You'll surely cause a massive parado-@#$%&#^%^!@#$#...ERROR NO CARRIER

Re:cant resist

[badboy_tw2002]

My God, the future has already been altered! He's using a modem!

Power

[drakyri]

This takes some work to set up, but will give you a lot of control over your power consumption.

As has been mentioned before, a lot of older readers are IDE devices, and so, can easily be converted to USB. (Note that for IDE, the device must be plugged in and powered when the system boots, otherwise it won't be recognized.)

After converting to USB, splice in relays - on the device power cable and the USB +5V cable (to prevent the device from half-powering-up via USB power). Connect the relay control to the appropriate voltage via a pushbutton switch which you can mount on the front of your computer (can sacrifice a drive bay for a panel of switches).

This will let you turn each device on and off as you want.

CATWEASEL!

[kzg]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Catweasel disk controller yet. http://www.jschoenfeld.com/products/catweasel_e.htm Its a hard to find board since its done in limited production runs.

Re:CATWEASEL!

[FridgeFreezer]

And a great excuse to buy an Amiga 1200.

I think your best chance with old and weird media (EG beyond the floppy drive) is to dig up an old system that supported the drive, from memory most stuff would either just about support a 720k/1.44Mb floppy drive or be able to spit data out of a Serial port. Grabbing RS232 or 485 data and saving it as a file wouldn't be too hard with a terminal package.

Stuff on audio tape should be fairly easy to get in via your sound card, from memory things like C64 emulators often have this functionality.

Oh yes - remember to park those winchester hard drives when you're done with them!

Step Two

[Anonymous Coward]

???

The question nobody's asked yet... .

[Chrisje]

Why? Why do you think you need such a thing? What are you going to use it for?

There's a plethora of different media out there. Anything from Punch-cards to Single-reel tape to QIC, HDD with different interfaces, hell, even Magneto Opical/UDO and Microfilm or, God forbit, Floppy or even normal Casette Tapes (Remember MSX "DatRecorders"?)

Then there's a plethora of software used to write to these media. Any tape drive usually was written to with Networker, DataProtector/Omniback II, AMANDA, NetBackup or BackupExec, not to mention older iterations such as ArcServe and whatnot. The Harddisks can be formatted with the most wild versions of FAT, FAT16, 32, NTFS in various flavours, Ext*, Reiser and so on, while Casette tapes were written by a BASIC OS.

Then there's a plethora of software used to create the objects on those media. You have your CoDecs for rich media, your office formats of yore like WordPerfect 5.1... The list is nigh endless. When you say you want a media reading PC, you need to delimit your project somewhat, because you could end up with half a data center filled with machines for various purposes.

So, again:
- Why do you need it?
- What for?

Besides, if you still have floppies with your original copy of The Secret of Monkey Island on it, do you really need to be able to read those, or do you simply surf into a retro-gaming site to find the images and a suitable run-time environment for them?

Re:The question nobody's asked yet... .

[nitsnipe]

Why not?
What's the point of moving ahead if we keep forgetting what we knew before, or for how much longer CAN we move ahead if we keep forgetting what we knew?
The answer is the same as the reason why we keep track of human history and teach it to our kids at school.
There might be a bit of nostalgia involved in taking on a project like this, but it fulfills our basic need to archive knowledge.

Re:The question nobody's asked yet... .

[DrgnDancer]

That doesn't really answer the GP's question. It seems pretty obvious from the answers here that to simply "be able to read all kinds of old media" is nearly impossible. Unless SOME kind of limit is placed on the question you could bleed money, time, and hardware for ever and never be able to read ALL the archaic old forms of data storage out there. Even if you limit yourself to the various types and incarnations of "personal computers" you're looking at dozens of combinations of hardware and software that have been used on hundred of systems from the Aquarius and Vic 20 cassette tapes through current Blue-ray and multi-terabyte tape systems.

On top of that, the VAST majority of the software available for these old systems has already been transfered, by someone, somewhere, onto a modern network connected hard drive available on the web or a newsgroup somewhere. I've seen floppy disk image files for ancient Commodore 64 software; and I'm sure the "retro" communities for the Amiga, Apple II, etc have done the same with every popular or modestly interesting (or freaking useless) piece of software ever written for those platforms as well. What's the point of being able to directly read the media?

If I absolutely MUST retrieve my high school English paper off of a 1541 formated 5.25 inch Commodore 64 disk (written in WordStar 2.0 probably) I can probably find a guy that still has a C-64 with a 1541 drive, and can get the data onto a modern hard drive. The same is probably true of a an Apple II disk that has MS Word 1.0 docs on it. The chance that these will be the same guy, with some massive media rig capable of reading EVERYTHING though, is pretty small. Some hobbyists will likely keep all of these formats readable for decades, if not forever; but they'll out of their individual loves for the Vic 20, the Apple II, or DOS 6.0, not because of some Frankenstein monster media machine with Blue-Ray drive, 25 different floppy drive model, and a couple of cassette player hanging off of it.

Step Three

[Anonymous Coward]

Profit

A pr0n-viewing PC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like someone, probably their "friend", wants to view their old pr0n.

oldest disk drive...

[retech]

If you want to start at the bottom...

figure out how to read the oldest disk first...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc

Catweasel

[Per Wigren]

A good start is to get a Catweasel floppy controller. If you connect a 3", a 3.5", a 5.25" and a 8" floppy drive to it you will be able to read almost any floppy disk there is, including C64, Amiga, CP/M, CPC, Mac, Apple II, Famicom and so on.

Then comes the bigger problem: Finding the tools to extract files from their filesystems. There are small extraction/conversion tools on the net for almost every format there is, collecting dust on long forgotten areas of FTP servers. Some of them require some slight modifications to compile on post-80s UNIX and some only run in MSDOS with full hardware access, but with some patience, DOSBox, Google and imgtool from MESS you should be able to work with most of them.

Then finally comes the biggest problem: Finding applications that can work with the actual files...

Re:Catweasel

[tehIvyn]

Catweasel hands down the best, used it to recover my archives of 6502 Assembly games I coded back in the 80s and saved on 1541 floppies.

Tape??

[Anonymous Coward]

What about punch cards? What, you dont dabble in programming by election ballots from florida? Line by line, byte by byte, just make sure you keep them in order and no hanging chads!

Re:Tape??

[Anonymous Coward]

What about punch cards?

Scanners could be used for that...

Re:Tape??

[squidfood]

Scanners could be used for that...

Wimps. For a full-media machine on the cheap, just use a magnifying glass and a magnet.

Another good question...

[SenorCitizen]

...is why do Ask Slashdot articles keep getting posted in other sections?

Re:Another good question...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should Ask Slashdot that... Problem is, it'll end up in Idle and everyone will ignore it.

But does it run Vinyl-ROM?

[bigjarom]

Make sure to provide support for this!

Re:But does it run Vinyl-ROM?

[etwills]

Make sure to provide support for this!

Reminds me of a conversation prompted by the University of Leeds computing staff passing round a *really* old department brochure in the pub. One of the IS mature students looked at the big square box in the middle of the room, and queried "is that a CD-ROM drive?"

"CD-ROM that early in the 80's?" said I, "nah. That'd be an LP-ROM drive".

The look on my face spoiled it ... eventually!

It seems a waste

[ledow]

This will be a lot harder than you think. It's not just the problem of keeping that machine running, having software that can use all those arcane formats, fitting it all into a box etc. The problem is that the hardware WILL die, whether it's the computer (which might have to have ISA slots etc. for some peripherals and so will be tricky to replace) or the media readers.

The method I use for data (and bear in mind that I haven't really bought anything new for a PC in years, so we're talking cheapskate methods) is to get a large hard drive every now and again (Christmas presents, recovered from broken PC's, old ones from work, etc.), and convert the media up to "hard drive" format. Being an emulation fan really helps here... disk images are the way to go. The first time you do it, it's an immense pain because you're swapping media, etc. But then, say your hard drive gets out of date (e.g. IDE vs SATA). You buy a SATA drive and automatically copy across all that old data including your virtual CD ROM images. Then when SATA is out of date, you do the same again.

Because of the increases in capacity each time, you'll barely notice that you're carrying around 10-15 year old data. I do this properly about every 2 or 3 years (and gradually over time as well), I end up getting a bigger hard drive from somewhere and "upgrading" again. My current PC has six hard drives (two of which are very old ones which I've already copied onto larger ones within the same machine and so can just disconnect them) and about four CD/DVD players (the first was a CD drive, the next was a CD-RW, then a DVD, then a DVD-RW, etc. each one superceding the last). I still have my very first hard drive laying about (it was a 40Mb Connor) and I still have the data that was on that drive on my newest drives.

Each one of those hard drives in my PC has the complete contents of at least two previous hard drives on it. And I still have the original hard drives (powered off in the base unit, or kept safely somewhere) for extra backup should I need it. It means that I don't lose my files, I never have to "recreate" something I've already done (scripts, programs, documents, etc.) and that I can do a quick search and know that I'm searching in every bit of data I've ever owned. When you KNOW that you saved something but can't remember the filename, when or where, that's a great assurance to have. I also have disk/tape images on every Spectrum game I ever owned, if you want to get silly. It's ridiculous how little space my entire Spectrum software library that took years to build up actually takes on a modern hard drive.

For peripherals, what I tend to do is wait for a format to establish itself (e.g. USB) and then slowly get all the adaptors I need to run all my old hardware on that format. So I have USB->just-about-everything adaptors. My main PC runs an AT keyboard with a PS/2 adaptor on a USB->PS/2 convertor. Then, when Wireless USB or some other successor comes along, all I need to do is buy a single USB->Wireless USB adaptor and I'm instantly back in business. No new keyboard required, and I have every adaptor necessary to run ANY type of keyboard should I need to. It means that my favourite hardware can last a lifetime (barring failure of the device itself).

It also makes things incredibly useful when you need to fix/repair/gut older PC's. If someone is still using an old AT PC, I'll have at least one cable/adaptor that will let me pull the data off it somehow, and a few more adaptors to get it working enough with modern hardware (USB, SATA, HDMI, etc.) so that I can get to the point to diagnose the computer if it's broken. If that means a daisy-chain of adaptors because the format is so legacy, so be it. At one point my mouse was a serial one, with a PS/2 adaptor, plugged into USB. I only upgraded because I wanted a scroll wheel. It can happen with everything. For example, I know for a fact that I have enough adaptors to convert a modern PSU (even ones with only SATA connectors but watch out f

Re:It seems a waste

[Reziac]

I did something like that last time I migrated data to a new machine.. a lot of it got moved to where I expect to find stuff, but most is still sitting there in straight-across copies of each partition from the previous machine (one partition per base directory). It proved easier to just leave most of it there than to bother moving it to the new location, it doesn't eat that much, compared to newer HD size, and meanwhile it serves as a complete backup for the old machine. And if I need something, it's still in the same directory structure as before, so easy to find.

First, get a building...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do some of this stuff for a living, and even though I can cover only a fraction of the media formats out there I have rack upon rack of obsolete peripheral devices. Most of the more recent ones are SCSI, some differential, some single-ended. A good few of the older ones (especially the old 12" 1GB glass optical disk drives) are bus and tag (I have SCSI converters for those...)

As for actually *reading* the data, I have about 19 feet of dog-eared, yellowing documentation and a C compiler.

You *sure* you want to get involved in this?

Macs.. CP/M.. and even older?

[sakusha]

Yeah, I've got a similar problem, I have tons of old disks but I'm mostly an Apple guy, so I've started my own project. I just bought a cheap old Performa, it has a SCSI port so I can attach all my old devices. Fortunately I kept my old Jaz drive, Syquest 40 drive and even an old Bernoulli Box. So I can hook them up and read all my old formats and move them over to my new Mac for archiving. I was pretty lucky that this Performa had an ethernet card in it, most Macs of that vintage didn't have Ethernet, or if they did, still required external adapters.
But what I really want to find is the Apple 5.25in Floppy drive. That would allow me to read my old PC disks, as well as Apple ][ disks (I have a lot of those too). I'm not sure I can read Apple ][ disks any other way, short of getting an old Apple ][, and then zapping the data over a serial cable. Fortunately I have a USB to Serial adapter that works on one of my Macs, although I may have trouble making an appropriate cable.
Now what really galls me is I have a bunch of old CP/M disks. I'm not even sure what format they're in. Some might be from a Kaypro, some might be from Osborne, some might be from a Vector Graphic. I don't think there was a true common format used by CP/M systems, although I recall that many systems used the North Star format. Well at least I don't have any 8in floppies.
I don't even want to think about the old cassette tapes I have from my Sol-20. I still have the original machine. how could I ever part with my first real computer? I did some serious restoration work and got the CPU up and running, but I can't get my RAM boards to work so I can't tell if the tapes work, let alone load. That will be another long-term project.

Re:Macs.. CP/M.. and even older?

[LWATCDR]

For the CP/M disks a good starting point would probably be a 1571 and a Commodore 128. It can read a lot of CP/M formats.
Your other option would be to try and find a copy of a program called uniform for the PC. It could read just about anything.

Magic Wand

[Gewalt]

What the op, tsm_sf, is looking for here, is a magic wand. He wants to build a cheap small machine he can stick anywhere and with it be a wizard at reading obsolete physical formats. But that's just plain absurd. The reason the old formats died off was simply because they WEREN'T small and cheap (and they ran out of bits).

So I offer two solutions to the OP. One is a usb floppy drive, which is everything his overly vague request requested. The second is a magic wand from Flourish & Bott's, 'cause that's the only thing that could possibly fulfill his request for anything older than floppy drives.

Re:Magic Wand

[Gewalt]

/sigh. of course, I meant Olivander's, not the bookstore. While you're accidentally in Flourish & Bott's, please be sure to check out my new book "Pedantical Me".

Re:Magic Wand

[Hognoxious]

We had such a thing at university, so that students and staff who had odd hardware could get data on to the network, and from there store it on something more common.

I'm assuming that around that time (when 3.5 inch floppies hadn't completely replaced 5.25) there were many proprietary formats in fairly common use. Amiga or Atari, perhaps.

Can't see why you'd want such a Frankenstein jobby one at home.

Re:Magic Wand

[mdwh2]

I'm assuming that around that time (when 3.5 inch floppies hadn't completely replaced 5.25) there were many proprietary formats in fairly common use. Amiga or Atari, perhaps.

Things weren't really any worse than the different file formats around today - IIRC, Atari used the same PC format, and although Amiga and Mac had their own custom formats, they also supported reading and writing using PC formatted disks.

In a way, things are worse today - e.g., I believe that non-Windows platforms can't write to NTFS drives, due to it being a closed format?

Re:Magic Wand

[Markspark]

this seems to have changed in later versions of the linux kernel, and in earlier, there was ntfs-write support, with the EXPERIMENTAL warning.

Re:Magic Wand

[ben0207]

Eh, sort of. It's not so bad these days. Macs can do it using MacFUSE (google it yourself, lazy) and not certain on all linux support but it seems to work fine on my Ubuntu box.

Re:Magic Wand

[HTH NE1]

We had such a thing at university, so that students and staff who had odd hardware could get data on to the network, and from there store it on something more common.

Same here, except the file transfer station wasn't networked. The strangest thing I encountered was a word processor on a Apple II DOS 3.3 floppy that saved its files as S-type files and the user wanted it on a PC. Solution was to use the word processor to print the file, where the printer was actually a null modem connection to a PC running a terminal program that could save incoming text to disk. Whole setup was an Apple IIe, Mac 512K, and some pizza-box model of PC. RS-232 serial ports can be a godsend.

For data migration, you need functioning hardware with overlapping media support. An Apple IIgs(*) is great for getting data from as old as a DOS 3.2 disk to an HFS disk (though I think the software to migrate from 3.2 to 3.3 still requires blank 5.25" disks, if you can take a disk image an emulator might help). An AppleTalk network from that IIgs to a suitably old Mac (or Linux system if you can find current drivers) that also supports AppleTalk networks can get around the rarity of 3.5" disks, and can also have Ethernet support so you can get it to anything modern.

In short, if you can get your original data as an image file, a single machine and a set of emulators can do your migration to modern hardware. But anything that requires access to old media is going to need old peripherals and the old hardware to access them, and that's going to make any system not-small. You need to focus on minimizing the hardware hopping.

(*) Did an Apple IIe converted to a IIgs still have a working cassette-in port?

Re:Magic Wand

[Artifakt]

I've got something like this at home, and because it is a Frankenkludge device, it doesn't really fit what the original poster asked for - he or she wanted compact.
But as to why it's at home...
I'm converting old analog formats to digital. Once you have a bulky analog source such as a single VHS tape deck connected to a video card, you've already ruled out compact, elegant, and such adjectives. Wanting to output to a DVD or similarly modern format means you can't go back to a really old machine either, Being able to convert analog video to digital means a pretty decent TV tuner type card and software that also rules out anything under about a 500 Mhz processor (unless you can wait a week for a conversion), but you could go back about that far. Wanting to mix together lots of old peripherals strongly suggests having several of both PCI and ISA slots, which pretty well means a small tower or bigger desktop model.
        When I got to that stage, putting in other stuff seemed sensible - as in, might as well use all the old parts you can - might as well cover the rest of the table, etc. So next in went a 5.25 floppy. Tower meant I could put in an old Zip drive, instead of an external that would hog a serial port I might need elsewhere... Those internal analog audio tape drives for PCs are getting cheap... Hey, I have a tape back-up that uses that unused serial port... 120 Mg 'superfloppy'...
      In the end, I can convert some really odd analog formats, such as 8 tracks, or copying 8mm or 16mm film. I can at least read from a lot of old digital devices, such as a Commodore 1541 floppy drive. But it takes up a long, skinny steel table and most of the space underneath.
      Why? I'm in my 50's, and actually built up a lot of media pre PC era. All my old analog video and audio collection is now digitized. That's a collection that was bigger than the Frankenkludge and its table when I started. My current PC doesn't even have a floppy drive, but the whole old record, cassette, etc. collection fits on one SATA drive. My parents, bless em, are still alive, and their old slides, videotapes of family gatherings, and so on, are in the process of being digitized too. Some recordings of my dad performing with the local symphony from 30 years ago are right now going to CD. My favorite local church has tapes featuring a few genuinely world class altos and sopranos that performed there from time to time, and digital copies of very old birth records, but the digital device was an Amiga 500 with 3.5 floppys. That's soon on the to-do list. After that, a local 2 year college has some music in their library that's supposedly only playable on this gadjet made in Chekloslovakia about 1980. I don't charge most of these people, but I could probably charge a few bucks to some, the college is definitely paying, and I would definitely charge any small businesses that need similar services. It's a hobby, but will probably pay itself off in a couple of years.
 

Re:Magic Wand

[Nar Matteru]

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

Re:Magic Wand

[Fluffeh]

Can't see why you'd want such a Frankenstein jobby one at home.

When I show this sort of enthusiasm for such a pointless cause, I believe I am showing symptoms of:

1) Boredom
2) Having too much money
3) Boredom, no really, still bored
4) Internet is down at my house

Re:Magic Wand

[tombeard]

FWIW, someone at work recently handed me a 3.5 floppy. I couldn't find a computer with a drive anywhere in the office so I bought a USB floppy at Microcenter for $20. Thought I should buy a box of disks but they didn't have any.Do thy still make 3.5 floppy disks? I didn't see any 5.25 or 8" USB drives.

Re:Magic Wand

[Hognoxious]

Being able to convert analog video to digital means a pretty decent TV tuner type card and software that also rules out anything under about a 500 Mhz processor

That makes sense, though most people would have a sufficiently powerful PC these days. If they didn't have a tuner card (possibly a capture card would do, if the VHS machine has the right A/V outputs) they might be able to borrow one. It's a noe time job, after all.

When I got to that stage, putting in other stuff seemed sensible

Two words: scope creep.

Its already been done

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get one of these
http://www.lc-tech.com/hardware/dracseries.html

I think I understand...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Get business idea from reading slashdot post
2. Get technical solution from posting an 'askslashdot'
3. .....
4. Profit!

See...

[Colin Smith]

A backup of my PC will only be about five million pages or so.

2 things...

1: Once you take out your operating system, applications, porn and downloaded music collection... How much real data do you actually have? I'd bet it'd fit on a handful of pages, particularly if you convert it to a standardised data format which might still be readable in 10,20 years.

2: An archive is not a backup. And a backup makes a poor archive. An archive is a copy of something you may want to read or access in 10 years, 100 years, 500 years. A backup is something you do to preserve your current working data set in case of failure.

HTH

Having said that. Even though paper has a proven n hundred year archival track record, I doubt it is a practical solution for digital data.
 

Re:See...

[Linker3000]

1: Once you take out your operating system, applications, porn...

You had me right up to that point.

Re:See...

[danbert8]

It would be more efficient to store pictures as pictures, and not printed as data. So just print your porn on a high quality color printer.

Re:See...

[gravis777]

I agree, you think that in 30 years, I won't want to look at my porn? Might as well throw out your 1978 Playboys and Dutch porn

Re:See...

[bigstrat2003]

Pictures? Truly, sir, you are stuck in the dark ages of porn. We have moving porn now.

Re:See...

[blueZ3]

So. A series of pictures then?

Re:See...

[SwordsmanLuke]

Make a giant flipbook.

Re:See...

[Bob McCown]

The pages would stick together.

Re:See...

[Reziac]

Excellent distinction between and archive and a backup. Thanks for putting it so clearly!

Re:See...

[Anonymous Coward]

1: Once you take out your operating system, applications, porn and downloaded music collection... How much real data do you actually have?

~650GB. I already have it seperated on an external HDD. And I use Aperture, so it's actually Data, not the same file over and over again (Same goes for lightroom users).

I can't even begin to imagine what wedding videographers have that they're contractually obligated to maintain.

It's a Breeze

[b4upoo]

If you have a computer club in your area or have a large number of friends you can surely get an old, but working 486 or early Pentium PC for free. That would kick the expense down to zero.
        It is funny when one takes a really old scrolling DOS text and tries to run it on a modern PC. You can't slow it down enough to read it. Even back in 486 days we had "turbo mode" which slowed down older programs enough to actually use them.

Re:It's a Breeze

[damn_registrars]

or have a large number of friends

This is slashdot we're talking on, here. For some its an accomplishment to have a friend (mother excluded of course).

Wangtek?

[Loki_666]

Wang-tek? No, i really don't want to know what sort of interface cards they make!

Re:Wangtek?

[zakezuke]

Wang-tek? No, i really don't want to know what sort of interface cards they make!

https://www.deltaperipheral.com/sales/index.php?manufacturers_id=27

Wangtek is a company, they made tape drives. IIRC their 5150ES was the one I was thinking about, 150meg not 120. I'm sure at some point I upgraded to 350meg or 525meg but still used the supply of 60/150meg tapes. They may have also made scsi controllers for the tape drives.

As you might imagine, since it was primary storage, I wanted the fastest one available. Wangteks were pretty quick and were often offered on PCs with a qic02/qic36 isa controller and some minimal software.

Re:Wangtek?

[jeffy210]

Though your post was informative, the sound you heard as you were typing it was the joke of the parent post doing mach 4 over your head.

Re:Wangtek?

[zakezuke]

Though your post was informative, the sound you heard as you were typing it was the joke of the parent post doing mach 4 over your head.

Not at all. Everyone knows the issue with Wangtek and Wang. Wang made some decent servers, but as with all servers they needed some downtime.

"I need look at your Wang"
"Your Wang is down"
"Your Wang is up"
"Your Wang is making a funny noise"
"I need to remove your Wang"

No, we've heard it all before.

old data

[Loki_666]

Let me guess, the OP works in the IT department of a publicly funded research institute?

Used to get requests all the time from scientist who suddenly realized they needed to get their old data off 5 1/2" disks (or even older formats).

They didnt seem to understand that keeping these things in boxes next to a magnto resonator for the last 10 years didnt do much good for the data stored therein.

Still, the punch card programs still were in ok condition.... just no way of reading them.

Looks like hardware is covered

[smchris]

Qemu/kvm for the software. I have PC-DOS 7, Windows 98, OS2 Warp 4 (for Galactic Civ the way God and Stardock intended) and XP. Still have a floppy and dd'ed my disks, and old CD's. Zips went to CD but I guess a USB Zip for continued availability.

Conflicting goals...

[JoeMerchant]

You want to read as many formats as possible, in as small a box as possible? What about those 8" floppies? But seriously, first identify what you must have, want to have, etc. and then buy a box that wraps that - I certainly wouldn't want a long lifetime project box like this to be implemented as a hydra of removable plug-ins that will get misplaced, dropped, or broken over then next decade. If you're really ambitious, the motherboard will likely need several ISA and PCI slots, as well as multiple IDE and SATA ports, and I would think that a Linux / Windows 98-SE / XP triple boot OS should cover most stuff in existence today that you would care about, but if you want to get really esoteric, you can also piggyback an Apple II on there....

Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a scanning Hall probe and a hi-res scanner. Everything else is just software.

Need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting ready to throw out a bunch of drives (SyQuest, QIC, Supertape, Zip 100, Jazz), some of them even new in plastic. Want 'em?

One machine to read them all ? No.

[billcopc]

The simplest, and most reliable way to do what you want, is to hold on to old PCs with those devices.

Others have already said it: many of these outdated formats depend on legacy interfaces that have been discontinued, like ISA/VLB ports. Keep an old Pentium machine around, most of them are built to survive armageddon anyway. Dig up some spare parts like AT power supplies, and stash them somewhere safe.

Ultimately, you should just transfer all these old memories to new storage and let go of the obsoleted physical medium. It's a ton of work, but it's better to do the transfer now, than to wait a few years and watch your retro-PC skills fade away. Do you think anyone in 10 years will have the slightest clue how to work with 1.44mb disk images ? Heck, a lot of sysadmins today have never even heard of HD-Copy or FDFormat. Chances are, in 10 years your memory will be rusty too!

Get a CatWeasel MK IV so you can read any floppy

[Joe The Dragon]

Get a CatWeasel MK IV so you can read any floppy disk format.

http://www.nishtek.com/cw.html

http://www.softhut.com/cgi-bin/test/Web_store/web_store.cgi?page=catalog/hardware/accelerators/catweaselmkiv.html&cart_id=6841513_65721

Convert

[V!NCENT]

First off all... why do you want a PC that can read all old media? Yes I know it's cool and "because you can" and all that, but old media like disk storage won't be readable in the future (magnetic loss, etc).

So maybe it is because you want your data to be readable in the future? Then just hook everything up to you 'normal' PC and start converting to newer formats.

What I do is that I make backups on the regular by burning data to DVD's and exchanging my data between my computers. This way my data never gets lost. I also only backup/archive that which is actually important to me. That way my home folder get's more and more 'stuffed' but 1TB storage costs about $150/â110 these days. It's a fucking joke... My backups (School map, music, save games, pictures and some movies (none include porn because downloading porn is so 2001) now takes up 3 DVD's. That's about 2 fscking dollars so who cares?

Borrowed from a HTPC design

[Anonymous Coward]

I pulled this from AVSforums, I'm building a media PC using a similar configuration right now:

        * CPU: Athlon X2 4850e ADH4850DOBOX 2.5GHz Socket AM2, $65.
        * Motherboard: ASUS M3A78-EM AMD 780G chipset microATX, $77.
        * Memory: A-DATA ADQVE1A16K DDR2-800 2 x 1GB Kit, $34.
        * HDD: Western Digital WD6400AAKS 640GB SATA, $77.

It's micro ATX, so can fit in a small case. The motherboard has just about everything you can think of built in. Add whatever you need (different types of media readers) and you'll be set for very little money.

Best news? 80W consumption while playing back an HD video. Closer to 60W at idle.

waste of time

[1u3hr]

Can't see why you'd want such a Frankenstein jobby one at home.

He doesn't. If he was serious, he'd already know exactly what kinds of disc/tape/card/wax cylinders he wanted to read and Googled how to do it. The only reason the question was submitted was to make a provocative "Ask Slashdot" topic. Same as 90% of these, hardly a word in their backstory is true, and all the brain sweat and long detailed posts written to attempt to help the poster are wasted.

Re:waste of time

[edittard]

Still, it'll attract plenty of "back in the day" and "get off my lawn" comments, so not entirely useless. Actually, on second thoughts...

Re:waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly. You make a good point.

But consider if even one other reader wants to build a similar PC, then it will help them.

But yeah, Ask Slashdot attracts a lot of white knights, doesn't it?

Cheers.

Re:waste of time

[LarsG]

"get off my lawn"

"Get off my LAN!", surely?

Re:waste of time

[Nero Nimbus]

I'm going to have to disagree with you about the wasted brain sweat. I actually find Ask Slashdot topics like these fascinating.

Re:waste of time

[1u3hr]

Possibly, but I find it dishonest and exploitative to ask people to help you with what is almost surely a fictional problem, as is probably the case here. If they explicitly made it a hypothetical then I wouldn't mind.

Re:waste of time

[tsm_sf]

hardly a word in their backstory is true, and all the brain sweat and long detailed posts written to attempt to help the poster are wasted.

A few points...

1) there was no backstory, it was a thought I'd had kicking around for a bit.
2) the long detailed posts full of "brain sweat" must have all been modded -1 at this point. I see a few posts on tape drives that might come in handy though.
3) my submitted story was (needlessly, IMHO) edited and reworded, but still enclosed in quotes as if it came directly from me.
4) As a computer hobbyist I'd like to cordially invite you to GTFO of slashdot for even thinking I wouldn't want 'such a frankenstein jobby one at home'. Are you insane?

However, I was lightly gratified to see you call my hobby a provocative topic. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing here, but please don't disabuse me.

Re:waste of time

[1u3hr]

Apologies, I really did think you were a fictional construct. I'm just a cynical bastard.

As a computer hobbyist I'd like to cordially invite you to GTFO of slashdot for even thinking I wouldn't want 'such a frankenstein jobby one at home'. Are you insane?

So are you saying you REALLY are going to build such a beast?

However, I was lightly gratified to see you call my hobby a provocative topic. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing here, but please don't disabuse me.

In the sense of provoking discussion; i.e. generating page hits for Slashdot.

I found the question curiously unspecific as to what kinds of media -- even if you were talking about file formats or physical media -- and for what reason. Thus my suspicions were aroused that it was deliberately open-ended rather than directed at solving a real problem. But I'll take your word for it.

Re:waste of time

[tsm_sf]

hehe yeah my submission was really too vague. I added a 'summary' post at the end of the discussion saying as much, but I doubt many people will see it. I basically have a ton of old hardware and was just thinking about the different uses for all this crap, and a "universal" media reader popped into mind.

It sounds like I'd either need to focus on more modern (physical) formats if I wanted a single compact machine, or dedicate a few tables and a portion of a room to the project if I wanted to get anywhere close to comprehensive. I'll probably start by throwing everything that'll fit into a box and work from there, plus ordering a Catweasel card as a few of the ppl mentioned. I really hoped that someone would have an elegant solution to the power consumption issue, but it gets cold here in the winter and I guess a little extra heat won't go to waste ;)

Anyhow, thanks for your reply and I hope no hard feelings for my snarky post.

Re:waste of time

[1u3hr]

No problem.

If you are trying to read old floppies, this may be helpful: How to recover data from an improperly stored floppy diskette

Surprising how helpful everyone is being!

[cjhanson]

In the "old days" many motherboards had a slot on the edge of the board which would allow more ISA/EISA, and sometimes PCI slots. There are also cards that can create the older interfaces if you wish to use a newer computer for speed. There may be some compatibility issues but this should be a good start. If you google around enough, I'm sure you can find someone making expansion/conversion cards.. there was a similar discussion here awhile back.

Likely there are companies making ways for you to get interfaces to older peripherals without having to just use a 12MHz 286. If it were my project, I'd start with a list of the types device I wish to support. From that list you can identify the types and numbers of interfaces (PCI/USB/PCMCIA/IDE/ATA/EISA/ISA/MCA/etc) that the devices need. You may likely find that you will have conflicting hardware specifications; older devices insisting on being on certain IRQs, clashing or limited bus speeds, that kind of thing. Also I'd look for companies selling N-in-1 devices. Today you can buy a printer that has 3 slots which together take almost all known memory card formats... perhaps there are companies which make a universal tape drive... etc.

Recap:

• Identify hardware. Try to find N-in-1 solutions.
• Identify interface types needed to plug in said hardware.
• Conflicts. Take some time doing the research on what each component requires resource-wise so that you can mitigate your risk of having two devices that won't play nice. There are always alternatives.
• Send me LOTS of money

Good luck man!

Re:Surprising how helpful everyone is being!

[JayAitch]

You expect people to be helpful on Monday. Personally I'm glad other people worry about things like this. Or else I wouldn't be able to download my favorite old Commodore 64 games.

On the other hand I tell my dad to throw out all his 3.5" disks. He has all these stupid EGA games that even when I played back in the 80's I didn't enjoy.

Parallel port tape drives

[gelfling]

Were the spawn of the devil. Oh they worked ok, but they were so damned slow I honestly did not care if they worked or not.

Standards

[kilodelta]

You'd be hard pressed to find anything now. Look at IDE for example, how many systems can you find with an IDE bus. Not many these days, it's all SATA and USB.

I have studied this issue since I once helped out an archive. During the study it was concluded that it was necessary to migrate old formats to new during the transitional period. Otherwise the further out in time you got, the less likely you could read the old formats.

Card reader

[JohnWiney]

Anyone seen a punched card reader for a PC? Or a mark-sense card reader? Those were the days - go through three trees in one evening of debugging....

Why keep the old junk?

[akira69]

Years ago I took my old floppies, recorded them to disk images, and got rid of floppies forever. Why not do the same for these weird formats? Unless you're constantly receiving new tapes/disks, get a reader from Ebay, image your files, then resell the reader. Repeat for other formats.

Related Subject - Software compatibility

[Bomarc]

I've not seen it directly mentioned here, but there is another problem what should also be addressed - software compatibility. I can think of three types of problems, and at least being aware of the problems would be a start; though a 'formal solution' would be better.

Example #1: Hard drive limitations - CorelDRAW for example; in earlier versions, the setup would fail with a vague error message. After fighting through tech support, I was able to find out that they didn't expect to have hard drives as large as 1GB. The solution was to setup a partition (with OS) that was less than 1GB. (Required me to setup another system). After the install is completed, a different utility ("Ghost" for example) could be used to transfer the entire OS to a larger drive.

Example #2: Copy protection based on outdated ideas. Some games used copy protection based on the speed / access to the CD-ROM drive. The first versions of Command & Conquer don't like fast CD-ROM drives. Finding an old 1 to 6x CD-ROM drive is not always a practical option. I'm sure that there are fixes / hacks for this particular problem, but the idea / concept needs to be aware for anyone working in this type of issue.

Example #3: Software that is dependent on the speed of the CPU. Gapper is a great example of this. The game was written for an 8088 CPU. On a 80286, it is a challenge, on a 386 it is almost impossible. Anything else, forget it. Short of finding an older system, I don't know of any viable work around for this type of problem. (I've tried to use "cpu slowdown" software, which did NOT slow the system down enough).

This could be setup as a compatibility "web page" somewhere, with the compatibility problem, and solutions. One would have to watch out that the line of "piracy" (and/or breaking of copy protection) is not crossed.

Re:Related Subject - Software compatibility

[A Life in Hell]

Emulation, emulation, emulation. Once you've got the data on to modern systems, you can run something like dosbox to emulate an actual 8088 PC (it has a mode for this), with a slow cdrom and a small hard drive. Or even bochs or similar. Compatibility is the easy part :).

Weird disk formats!

[spaceyhackerlady]

I help maintain a legacy product that, for reasons best forgotten, uses its own file system and its own disk geometry (32 sectors per track) on 3.5 inch floppies.

Other than using the system itself, I can read and write disk images on a Linux box with a real /dev/fd floppy drive and some creative usage of setfdprm. I'm still scratching my head over how to do the same thing with a USB floppy drive. I'm also still trying to find a way to convince my boss I should write a new utility (the old one is crap) to take a bunch of files and make a series of floppy image files, a la mkisofs.

Modifying the firmware to read more modern devices is probably doable. Making the thing boot off modern devices requires rewriting the boot ROM and is probably beyond our present capabilities (it's a long story...).

...laura

What about the sound?

[Joce640k]

I can the sense of printing out all my avi files as flipbooks, but what about the sound?

USB Re:Wrong end of the stick

[peas_n_carrots]

Agreed with the approach. I would recommend looking for USB peripherals first. There are USB versions of floppy drives (3.5", and I'm sure I've seen 5.25"), Zip, Jazz, CD-ROM and DVD-ROM of course, and probably many others. The local computer surplus store sells USB versions of many of those older storage devices. You could kill N birds with one stone with an IDE/SATA to USB adapter, then stock up on the devices which use IDE/SATA interfaces. USB is ubiquitous and will be around for a long, long time. The advantage here is that you don't need a particular PC to read media. Plug the device(s) into a computer running a decent OS (XP, Linux, maybe OSX) and you should be able to read from the mass storage devices.

If you wanted to make it look nice, get something like a vertical shoe rack, place the drives into the shelves and all the USB cables to a big USB hub. Plug the USB hub into a computer and all the devices are available at once :)

Cheaper solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd probably be better off finding an old parallel port HDD (a la BackPack) and then looking for old PCs with the media drives that you need. Boot the old PC and transfer the data from the media in question to the hard drive. Then, copy the salvaged data to your new PC. Several advantages here:

1) You might not have to buy all of the drives that you need. You can usually find old PCs with weird drives in libraries, etc that most people will let you use if you explain your situation.

2) If you do have to buy, it is usually chaper to buy a complete XT system with a tape drive/MO drive/etc. than just buying the drive.

3) Since you have the old PC with the drives (presumably) already working, you don't have to worry about drivers for ancient hardware.

4) All of your old data will be transferred at once, so there's no need to maintain some oddball hardware just in case you need to retrieve something 2 years from now.

5) The old PCs will get one last chance at relevance before they depart this mortal sphere...

5.25 floppies

[damn_registrars]

Like many true geeks, I still have old crap on 5.25 floppies. However, I would rather not build up an old 486 to do it.

I've heard of a way to frankenstein a 5.25 floppy to make it work over USB - does anyone have the method? I have had no luck finding it myself.

digital preservation

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital preservation is one of the biggest problems facing enterprise and government these days.

The National Library of Australia created a project to try address getting information off physical carriers and onto spinning disk storage. They're also working on creating and maintaining view paths for older physical media.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/prometheus-digi/

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek is also working on these sorts of problems.

http://www.kb.nl/index-en.html

Paper has a proven n hundred year archival...

[nick_davison]

Even though paper has a proven n hundred year archival track record

Depends on your definition of proven and archival.

Given susceptibility to liquid spills, sun bleaching, crumpling, tearing, ink fading, etc... Even if you discount the huge percentages that are tossed away because no one really cares anymore, most paper copies still don't survive all that long at all.

It's true, there are some instances of old paper mediums where most of the data is recoverable hundreds of years on, if you're willing to work hard enough.

But, by that token, most of the media we dismiss as fallible, we're judging by a different standard. We expect sub 1% fail rates for any bits of data for the time periods we're judging media as stable for. By that, paper would fail terribly. Apply the criteria we use for paper and the floppies I have from the early 80s are doing amazingly.

Find a collector or club of vintage computers

[ckblackm]

Perhaps finding someone who has some of these old computer(s) and parts, would enable you to copy the data you need. Many of these collections contain working machines that you might could access. My personal collection stretches back into the '70s, but most of my stuff is from the 80's. Chistopher

Reading the "Media" is the tip of the iceberg

[RexDevious]

Here's fun experiment to try out:
1. Transfer the oldest windows media readable file you can find lying around (something from like 15 years ago) into your current system. Congratulations, you've just solved the "read media" problem the author poses.
2. Now, try to actually view that media. One of three things will happen:
-A)Your current machine will play the media, but highly distorted.(~90% of the time)
-B)Your current machine will play the media correctly (~7% of the time).
-C)Your computer will report that the required codec cannot be located (~3% of course).

My point is that being able to read all physical "media" (and I've got some really rare ones here) is only helpful if you can read the *data* from that media correctly. And while the latest Microsoft Word program will probably convert enough of a Word Perfect 1.0 document for you to not notice the difference, there are a host of other data formats that simply can't be read on anything other than an old machine, with old dll's.

So, to *truly* build the ultimate media-reading machine - not only would you need all the various drives necessary (which would probably have to be from a host of other networked machines - but you'd also have to have several different virtual machines set up within that main machine to ensure you were really seeing the data as it originally existed.

Here's a question for the others in that vein:
What criteria would you use to determine the make up of the virtual machines?

-Current software from every year or two?
-Every possible combination of operating system version and the software released during it's time-frame (though you could at least narrow it down to the software needed to read just the data you were interested in)?
-The latest version of the operating system and software from the date the file was last modified on?
-Opening up the file itself raw to determine what software it expects to run on, and using *exactly* that version?

Though my example of windows media files is the easiest to spot problems in, I'm sure we're all keenly aware of how different an HTML page written in 1995 would look on a browser released in 2005. Yeah, you could still get the gist of it, but you *not* have truly seen the "data" - the information which that file really contained for the person who created it in 1995 using god knows what.

I wonder if the government is working on this problem? Who knows what sort of secret messages terror groups are hiding in their blink or no frames tags? Maybe the background noise on Osama's tape is actually a deadly BASIC program readable only by a Texas Instruments TI-994A, or contains an infrared signal only readable by the Microsoft-Timex Databank watches of the 90's? This may sound totally ridiculous, but these guys *do* live in caves - it ain't like they're registered iPhone developers. I mean, remember the "shoe bomber", the moron whose responsible for you (and everyone else) having to take off your shoes while trying to board a plane? Ya know what he tried to ignite his shoes with? Matches! Matches??? I'm sorry, but if you're trying to take down airplanes but haven't even heard of cigarette lighters yet; I'm reading all your email on an 8088 clone running Windows for Workgroups and Eudora 1.0.

Stupidest article on Slashdot in a while.

[suso]

This has to be one of the stupidest articles on Slashdot. There is no one solution for this and it will not be cheap at all. If you want any hope of reading old computer data formats, you're going to be buying lots of old hardware, drives, different architectures.

Its not the computer that reads the data, its the peripherals. Even with old stuff on ebay, I think you'd be looking at several thousand dollars if not tens of thousands to buy all the equipment to read all the formats from the 70s, 80s and 90s.

I really wish I could just stick my Amiga floppy disks into my Intel box, but alas, the disk formats are different. So I'd have to buy an Amiga, an ethernet card for it (this is actually the expensive part) and copy the files over the network.

Honestly though, if you could get people to agree to let you have their old media, digital archeology would be kinda fun.

My theoretical builds

[Anonymous Coward]

Normal build:
          I'd make sure the machine has a few PCI slots, so I can add a card if needed. IDE, SATA, USB, Firewire, I'd go for a parallel port if possible and a floppy connector. This really handles a lot of situations. With the PCI slots, SCSI can be added as needed via PCI slots.

          More extreme build:
          To cover more historical formats, I'd get something like a Optiplex Gx1. This box usually has a P2-400 but can have up to a P3-600. Maxes at 384MB of RAM. But 3 PCI, 2 ISA, and 2 that'll take either one. Just nice enough to run Ubuntu, but with support for any old cards. This'll allow MFM, RLL, any proprietary tape things with ISA cards, more SCSI possibilities, and so on. I'd scrounge and find one of the combo-floppies that had a 3.5" *and* a 5.25" on it. But it would also make this machine too bulky unless I REALLY needed it. And as said by "Per Wigren (5315)" right in this very thread, a Catsweasel for older disks.

Old media decays

[GWBasic]

The problem with old media is that a lot of it decays. While a 30-year-old vinyl record might still play fine, a 30-year-old tape is often de-laminating and close to complete loss. Disks might suffer the same fate. I've seen plenty of CDRs flake thier data away. Instead of trying to build a PC that can read everything; consider archiving the data to hard drives which can be easily duplicated on an annual basis.

Recap

[tsm_sf]

Ok, thanks for all of your comments! I'm not sure that anyone will ever see this post since the story is now off the front page, but I wanted to recap the lessons identified (by me at least).

1) Find a Catweasel.
2) If you're concerned about power consumption you're going to have to hack some hardware.
3) There's data recovery and then there's data recovery.
4) Tape in any form is not going to be fun to work with.
5) Any setup that's remotely interesting will grow to consume as much space as possible, however this can pay for itself if you let it.
6) Some people, posting on /., are baffled when confronted with a computer hobbyist.
7) Some people will troll any damn thing. Others will mod them insightful.

Overall, I'd have to say that 'asking slashdot' was a bit of a disappointment. Most of the helpful posts were of an obvious nature (get usb devices!) or ended by stating that the parts of this project I had identified as interesting (size, power consumption) were hard to accomplish. Thanks, but I knew that. I think most of the blame rests on myself, and I should have been more explicit about the areas I was having problems with. In general I'd say that I was too general.

I'd like to end this by stating that, as god is my witness, I never thought I'd have someone on Slashdot ask me why I wanted to build.