Need Help Salvaging Data From an Old Xenix System

Milo_Mindbender writes "I've recently gotten ahold of an old Altos 586 Xenix system (a late '80s Microsoft flavor of Unix) that has one of the first multi-user BBS systems in the US on it, and I want to salvage the historical BBS posts off it. I'm wondering if anyone remembers what format Xenix used on the 10MB (yes MB) IDE hard drive and if it can still be read on a modern Linux system. This system is quite old, has no removable media or ethernet and just barely works. The only other way to get data off is a slow serial port. I've got a controller that should work with the disk, but don't want to tear this old machine apart without some hope that it will work. Anyone know?"

Comments

Re:audio

[Anonymous Coward]

if the thing has a pc speaker you can (with a bit of work) and a noisy export via modulated audio.

Alternatively, he could uuencode all the data, cat it to tty, take photos of the monitor and then OCR it.

of course if you have access to a serial port controller that's easily the simplest method.

Let's be realistic -- where's the fun in doing it like that?

no way! the best way is...

[Kwirl]

these people are all wrong...just take it to Best Buy! the Geek Squad could save the data for you fo' sure!