Gene Roddenberry's Floppy Disks Recovered (pcworld.com)

Press2ToContinue writes: When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work. To make matters worse, about 30 of the disks were damaged, with deep gouges in the magnetic surface. "Cobb said a few of the disks were formatted in DOS, but most of them were from an older operating system called CP/M. CP/M, or Control Program for Microcomputers, was a popular operating system of the 1970s and early 1980s that ultimately lost out to Microsoft's DOS. In the 1970s and 1980s it was the wild west of disk formats and track layouts, Cobb said. The DOS recoveries were easy once a drive was located, but the CP/M disks were far more work. " So what was actually on the disks? Lost episodes of Star Trek? The secret script for a new show? Or as Popular Science once speculated, a patent for a transporter?

Unfortunately, we still don't know. The Roddenberry estate hasn't commented yet, and the data recovery agency is bound by a confidentiality agreement.

Comments

Given a choice in the 70's

[invictusvoyd]

I'd use a typewriter and a carbon paper for backup.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[roc97007]

Fanfold printouts.

I'm a little sad that programmers these days don't even know what that is.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[arth1]

I still use a dot matrix printer with fanfolds for security logs. While an intruder can erase logs on a system, or DoS a network connection to a remote syslog server, or even kill printing processes before a laser print has come out, she cannot erase what has been printed out on a line printer.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Floppy disks probably suffer from a problem similar to what old magnetic tape suffers from. The oxide separates from the backing. Maybe the floppies need to be "baked" like old magnetic tape - to the point where the oxide re-adheres, temporarily, to the backing.

http://audio-restoration.com/baking.php

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[gstoddart]

LOL ... I have very fond memories of fan-fold greenbar paper to mark up some code with a coffee for an hour or so before I went back to fix the code.

Programming involved a lot more thinking and planning, instead of bashing it until it compiled.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[russotto]

While an intruder can erase logs on a system, or DoS a network connection to a remote syslog server, or even kill printing processes before a laser print has come out, she cannot erase what has been printed out on a line printer.

Unless she can manage to set lp0 on fire. Though this takes Elaine Roberts level hackery.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[roc97007]

I miss those days.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Yeah, but what kind? Thermal? Dot matrix? Daisy-wheel?

Oh wait, "line printer"? Holy shit, I just learned something new today.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[__aaclcg7560]

We're better off without fanfold paper. When I was in college in the early 1990's, a roommate borrowed some paper to complete his ten page final report. I don't know what caused him to get paper from the middle and not the end of the stack. When it came time to print out my 200+ page final report for technical writing, I ran out of paper halfway through printing. Reloading the printer and resuming the printout from where I left off was a tricky operation back then. I only had enough paper to get it right the first time to avoid turning it in late. Since I was using a Commodore 64, I couldn't ride my bike over to Kinko's to print out on the laser printer. My roommate had no clue to how close he came to dying that day.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[__aaclcg7560]

Programming involved a lot more thinking and planning, instead of bashing it until it compiled.

Try translating an old BASIC game into a modern programming language. All those GOTO and GOSUB statements can get tedious. I spend a fair amount of my time mapping what goes where in the program before I can even start coding. For fun, of course.

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

DoS in the 70s would probably involve a stationwagon full of magnetic tape storage :)

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[gstoddart]

You, sir, are truly hardcore.

Having spent a good chunk of my career maintaining legacy code for which the original authors have long since moved on, I can say it's a special skill to wade though existing code and figure out what the hell it does and how to fix/modify it.

I've known several people who ran screaming from legacy code. It's not for everybody.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[phantomfive]

Ah, that reminded me of the smells and sounds of an old dot matrix printer. Mmmmmmmm.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[The-Ixian]

Can you control the roller in a line printer?

If so, couldn't you just tell the printer to back up a line before printing the new line?

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[__aaclcg7560]

You, sir, are truly hardcore.

As a child, I entered these BASIC programs into my Commodore 64 and couldn't get most of them to run. As an adult who later went back to school to learn computer programming, I find it significantly challenging to go back to these old BASIC programs and successfully translate them into Python.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[WarJolt]

I'd use a typewriter and a carbon paper for backup.

The problem with paper is that it has the same problem of storing a floppy in a box for 30 years. Floppies and paper degrade over time. Paper degrades slower, but if you put the box in a bad location, it's not going to last very long.

the CP/M disks were far more work

cpmtools looks fairly easy to use and easy to install on ubuntu.
sudo apt-get install cpmtools
You can probably get it all done with a dd and a cpmcp command.

I think the corrupt disks would be the trickiest part.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you control the roller in a line printer?

If so, couldn't you just tell the printer to back up a line before printing the new line?

Well you could overprint (was that a "+"?) but I don't remember backing up.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Knowing the kind of things that are not obvious to a reader not intimate with the code, and commenting on what the reader might want to understand, seems to be a somewhat rare skill.

Like writing in general, you have to be able to imagine the ideas unfolding in the mind of the reader, and put that to work for you. With cleverness and little surprises for general writing, and the exact opposite, to immediately satisfy the puzzlement, when commenting code.

Granted some of these older systems that derive from punch cards might not have much capacity for commenting.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[gstoddart]

I've only ever used punch cards as notepads.

But having inherited several tens of thousands of lines of C code for which the authors had all left, and needing to work through it, fix something, and then eventually get it to compile on a different platform ... and then over time fix memory leaks and performance bottlenecks ... well, I don't think it's for everybody.

Not sure I'd want to do it again, but I really enjoyed it at the time. I know for a fact at least one person me before had run screaming from the task.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[The-Ixian]

This is what I was getting at.

Of course, the attacker would have to be pretty clever, have a lot of knowledge about the system and know how to put it all together. But making your printed log illegible is effectively the same thing as erasing your print.

Probably easier to just stop the process by which the log text is being sent to the printer.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[arth1]

On a character printer, you can back up and overwrite up until it does a line feed. That was often used for emphasis, printing the same character multiple times.
On most line printers, no - it prints a line at a time and advances the paper, and after that, it's pretty much permanent.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the old HCF command.

Simple.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

If you know what you're doing, you can make a line (or drum) printer literally walk across the floor.

Go look it up while I comb out my gray beard, hike up my shorts, spin my propeller beanie, and adjust my sandals.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[silas_moeckel]

Are you filtering for things like ESC j n that is an epson reverse linefeed. It realy was not that hard to get a general purpose line printer to spit back up and overprint with random strings.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue isn't so much the OS itself, it's the bewildering array of file formats used by the old software packages (there was no standard "DOC", "RTF", or "ODF" format back then, and every word processor package had its own "special sauce" way of packing text-formatting and control codes into the text), and the fact that there different computers all had their own unique disk formats, all the way down to the directory structure, the physical track/sector layout, and even the byte markers used to indicate the start and end of each sector. (And on top of that, some systems used "hard-sectored" disks, where instead of a single index hole used to measure RPM and indicate the position of sector 00, as in a "soft-sectored" disk, the disk was punched with multiple index holes that marked each sector's position.) That sort of thing is far different from just being able to emulate the OS in a virtual machine.

It really was, as the original article says, a "wild west of disk formats" back then; you were lucky if you could even get cross-compatibility between the Model X computer and the Model Y computer from the same manufacturer, much less anything remotely approaching a "standard" that could be recognized by machines from two different companies!

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[mikael]

They're still in use at some airports. The Epson printer may be a bit yellowed, but it's still screeching out passenger lists.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[mikael]

The biggest danger to trying to resurrect an old floppy disk using a still functional disk drive, is that the modern day OS will try stomping all sorts of dot files into every directory. Need to make sure the disk is write-protected before using.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems awful wasteful. Why not simply pipe all logs to a serial port connected to an otherwise air-gapped machine that records the incoming signal verbatim? No paper waste, far less electricity waste (assuming a RasPi or similar class machine) and the receiving machine could even parse the logs looking for suspicious activity if you desired.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Megane]

Disks are not as bad as tape because the magnetic particles in tape have another layer of tape on the other side to stick to. As long as you keep them indoors in air-conditioned space without extreme humidity and away from anything magnetic, getting 25 years from floppy disks is no problem. Still, there's no telling how long they will still be readable beyond that.

Back around 2005 or so, I imaged all my old TRS-80 disks from the '80s using a Catweasel board, and they read just fine. The only read errors seemed to be ones from back in the day. (I also imaged a bunch of Apple II and C64 and a few CP/M floppies that I had lying around at the time. That's when I learned that Commodore's GCR encoding was shit, and Woz was indeed a genius.)

The real problem is if you have 8-inch disks, because you have to find an 8-inch drive. Seeing "CP/M" in the summary implies that they might have been on 8-inch disks. Then you have to hook the drive up. They use almost completely different data and power connectors from 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" drives. (These days it might be easiest get an adapter board made.) They also usually want a head-load signal, something that became obsolete early in the 5 1/4" era. I have a stack of disks (CP/M, TRSDOS-II, TRS16-Unix, even RT-11) and some TRS-80 Model 2/12/16 drives to hook up to that Catweasel board someday.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[lgw]

<one-upsmanship>I once had a project to do the same with a PL/S program. The fun bit was, we didn't have a PL/S compiler, nor the source code. Fortunately, PL/S compiled to assembler as an intermediate step, so we had the generated assembler with the source as comments. </one-upsmanship>

Not a task I'd like to ever do again, but it was neat to do it once. Maintaining what was effectively "object code with debugging symbols" is not for the faint of heart.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Megane]

Another issue is that paper is paper. Not only is there going to be some redundancy in the data, but you don't need something special to read it. Magnetic storage came in many formats, only a few of which became mainstream. We get used to being able to read a CD from the '80s in a modern BD-ROM drive. But aside from 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" and maybe Zip 100, no other magnetic disk format became mainstream since the '80s. 8-inch disks are the ancestor of 5 1/4" but not directly plug-compatible like 3 1/2" was.

A Catweasel or similar board at least lets you read the lowest level of formatting, which is the time between flux reversals. I can read FM, MFM, Apple GCR, and Commodore GCR by appropriate post-processing of the track data. Beyond that, I can read the filesystem in the disk image with the right software. But I can't make a disk fit in the wrong type of drive.

I'm still wishing I hadn't passed up those two or three Amstrad CP/M computers at thrift stores back in the '90s, because they aren't making 3" floppy drives anymore. That is also the format that Nintendo used for the Famicom floppy drive. There was yet another 3 1/4" disc format that was a miniature 5 1/4" disc that I think only Smith Corona typewriters used, but I don't think I've ever seen one of those in person. Once Apple and HP (?) adopted the Sony 3 1/2" drive back in 1984, the others vanished before almost anyone even heard of them.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

...we didn't have a PL/S compiler, nor the source code. Fortunately,...we had the generated assembler with the source as comments.

You didn't have have the source code. Fortunately, you had the source code.

Umm...

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Penguinisto]

Funny thing - never thought the Okidata 830 chassis would live that damned long. But then, carbon copies aren't dead yet either. :)

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[serviscope_minor]

If you search around you might be able to find the file with a line printer playing "blue danube", by printing out something to make the hammers hit in the right pattern. I believe it was performed on a chain printer.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[roc97007]

Funny thing - never thought the Okidata 830 chassis would live that damned long. But then, carbon copies aren't dead yet either. :)

...not quite (carbon copies). A relative of mine manages her own business, and although she's upgraded from the Mac-XL (points if you know what that is) to a real computer, she still uses carbon paper in her business. It's become rare enough that she bought out all the inventory in town and and stores it carefully. She figures she now has a supply that'll last somewhat longer than she would expect to be alive.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[david_thornley]

CP/M could work with different disk drives. I used double density 5.25" floppies.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[The Optimizer]

Ahhh. David H Ahl's 101 BASIC games - those were written on a mainframe I believe, and required a little bit (not much usually) of work just to translate to the BASIC dialects found on the common machines of the time (Commodore PET, Apple ][, TRS-80, Atari). The Atari BASIC was the hardest of the bunch because it's string handling differed the most (not being based on the Dartmouth/Microsoft BASIC interpreters of the time)

For real fun, I remember at about age 14, taking a commercial game- Starbase Hyperion - that was written in Atari BASIC, but had a few 'anti-hack' measures, and undoing them to make it readable when listed (like coming up with meaningful names for all the variables - they were in a table that had been replaced with control characters).

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[steveg]

They had plenty of *capacity* for commenting -- depending on your budget for punch cards. You could use most of 80 columns for each line of comment (and a card for each line.) I seem to remember putting a "C" in the first column for a comment with FORTRAN, don't remember what the convention in Pascal was.

But it was cumbersome, and there probably wasn't much of a culture of commenting, so if you're dealing with that old code, you might not find many comments.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[The-Ixian]

Well... we got to the bottom of that one.

Thanks ;)

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[kimvette]

> Fanfold printouts.

Best thing in the world for tracing spaghetti code.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[arth1]

Are you filtering for things like ESC j n that is an epson reverse linefeed.

Mine has a dip switch for printing a * for each control or unknown character instead of parsing them.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple's GCR was 75% efficient (3 data bytes became 4 GCR bytes), while Commodore's was 80% efficient (4 became 5). Other than decoding speed, why would you say Commodore's was shit compared to Apple's?

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Grog6]

Line printers are high volume printers; 60 to 70 inches per minute, printing one character in each position on one line per 'strike'. Sounds like a Jackhammer on speed. After the sound dampening covers. This is a LOT of paper per second to stop and backup, as you might imagine. :) IIRC, trying to hold the output up to see it too fast was enough to stuff it up, cascading paper everywhere. :D These print EVeryones printjobs, in sequence. Screwing that up could seriously cost you, friend wise.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah memories of Slackware floppy installs.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Zero__Kelvin]

That's ridiculous. Either the device driver understands the filesystem, or it can't read it so never tries to write to it. Where did you get such an absurd idea? Even if it were true that some files would be created that happen to begin with a dot, who cares?

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure she can erase printed output, even from a dot matrix. They sell these little pink rubbery things called, get this, erasers. Who knew?

Hackers can do anything. I've seen it all in movies and TV shows. They type a single command and in 2 lines of dialogue they get whatever they want. No security system withstands more than 3 of their guesses. All data can be correlated. Formatting is never an issue. The systems they hack are never down for maintenance. And the hacker's own system never crashes, or demands to reboot at an inconvenient time, or does weird or unwanted things. Unless they too are under attack from hackers, of course!

Re: Given a choice in the 70's

[dickens]

Once when I was setting up a dedicated syslog server I installed a dot matrix printer on a serial line in a locked room. The final touch was snipping the transmit+ pin to make it truly write-only.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

First, I think he's referring to something like .DS_Store files (i.e. OSX custom attribute files) which do indeed spawn like bunnies.

But the main point may be why take a chance and write at all? Just write-protect and read the contents asap. Even a single read may damage the disk but you get the data. Which was the entire point of the exercise, wasn't it?

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[wonkavader]

Yeah, the CP/M stuff was just "far more work" for them because they had to lift a finger. CP/M disk formats are not hard.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[R3d M3rcury]

she's upgraded from the Mac-XL (points if you know what that is) [...]

Now, was it a Mac XL or was it a Lisa?

Wow...she should probably get in touch with some museum or something to sell it.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, I remember typing in Mayfield's "Super Star Trek" on a mini with an odd BASIC variant. I never did get it to work.

Speaking of porting those old games to modern programming languages, did you know that ESR ported UT Super Star Trek to Python??

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[roc97007]

It was a Lisa that someone had converted to a Mac XL. It had a small hard drive (in low megabytes, I think) and ran some tweaked version of the Mac OS (to support the different geometry of the Lisa display). As I recall, it had a crunchy drive, not the weird floppy drive the Lisa had.

A museum sounds like a good idea. I'll ask her if she still has it. It's possible that someone made a real interesting find at a garage sale...

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Megane]

Because the code combinations used made it much harder to resync. Apple GCR had special combinations that would only appear at the start of sector ID or sector data. Commodore only had a limited number of codes and none of them were reserved for sync. I was writing my own decoder for the track data and there was no guaranteed way to find the start of a sector or ID, you had to kind of guess.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[wonkavader]

No.

CP/M standardized the dirs and file system. Even ZCPR3 added on top was straightforward and wouldn't take you an hour to figure out.

Yes, there were different sector setups. You run through them all until you find the format. That takes an hour. So complex? No.

And no, most word processors used text files. Things were WAY more straight-forward in the days of CP/M. DOC, RTF and ODF are nightmares compared to CP/M-based word-processor formats. OK, let's say this was an odd one. So you run the damn software he used under a CP/M emulator and you print the files to the emulated rs232 port and capture the output.

This is a trivial problem and there's absolutely no way anyone with a half a brain could have taken a year to do it.

Re: Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

HCF love it, I remember the DEC extensions well. Went viral via photocopy and sneakernet.

Re: Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wants Gene Roddenberry's Floppy Dick anyway?

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[fragMasterFlash]

How many linefeeds does it take to advance an entire ream of fanfold paper through a printer? No more paper, no more logging.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[arth1]

How many linefeeds does it take to advance an entire ream of fanfold paper through a printer? No more paper, no more logging.

The point isn't to keep logging going after an intrusion. Killing syslogd (or other log service) will kill logging. It's from preventing erasure of the logs of the compromise itself, before an intruder gets a chance to kill logging and do other mayhem. it's very useful as a physical audit trail of all logins and other successful security events. Logging successful events means that you can't DoS the printer until you can generate a successful event, which has then been printed out already, before you can do anything about it.

As for how many lines, well, I believe a common size is 2500-3000 sheets of tractor paper in a box. A line matrix printer will take several hours to print out one box, and a dot matrix even slower. Depending on the dpi of the font used, we're talking a substantial amount of lines.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Tyrannicsupremacy]

fire alarm control panels are still sometimes hooked up to dot matrix printers.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[__aaclcg7560]

The program was self-documenting.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[HornWumpus]

That explains it. She was using it until she finished paying for it.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[HornWumpus]

I still have an 'Eight inch floppy' t shirt. No drives though.

I'd wear it to a conference, just to make a SJW's head explode.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Bugamn]

I found a thread on HackerNews about playing "Eye of the Tiger" on a dot matrix. A comment seems to direct to the file you mention.

Re: Given a choice in the 70's

[MarbleMunkey]

A grey-beard EE I knew in my LUG back in the late '90s told me stories about working to develop HDDs for mainframes, back when they were only kilobytes of storage. There was one in particular that had 6 foot platters sizes to just fit through a set of double doors; they used hydraulics to move the read heads, and had to have them in symetric pairs otherwise it would walk across the floor.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[mikael]

I did this myself. I had some old MSDOS 3.0 floppy disks, and placed them in a Windows 95 PC. It tried to do something. Either windows attempted to restructure the file system from regular 8.3 FAT to extended FAT, rewrite a new BIOS, or a virus scanner placed checkmarks.

Remember many file systems write out the date that a file was last accessed, not just when it was first created.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Zero__Kelvin]

" Either windows attempted to restructure the file system from regular 8.3 FAT to extended FAT, rewrite a new BIOS, or a virus scanner placed checkmarks."

Those are three things that didn't happen. As far as Windows trying to do a live filesystem replacement, I can guarantee you it has never happened in the history of Microsoft. Presumably you meant something like rewrite the boot sector or similar, since it makes absolutely no sense at all to talk about rewrite(ing) a new BIOS. It seems like you probably have no idea what you mean when you say a virus scanner placed checkmarks (I can guarantee you nobody else does.)

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[mikael]

I know something was written out because the disk drive light turned to the "writing data out" color, and since the disk was readable before and unreadable afterwards (and also unrecoverable), I know that something got mashed. Making other disks read-only prevented this from happening. It could simply have been the age of the disk. With the "dir" command set to show hidden and system files, sometimes filenames with name like ~filesys.dat~ would appear.

Re:Given a choice in the 70's

[Anonymous Coward]

Chain printers were scary. We used to print a pallet of paper in 36 hours on 2 of them. You'd press the page advance button and it would whip out the fanfold paper 1-2 feet above the printer as 5-10 pages went past.

Luckily they had sound proofing enclosures. They were quieter than anything else in the server room when closed.

Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Star Trek nerds want to see Gene's floppy disks...

Re:Heh

[malditaenvidia]

They better not copy those floppies.

This is what really happened

[roc97007]

They found kilobytes and kilobytes of nudie RTTY art. The only one they could have published was this one so they decided to just put the floppies back in the box and forget the whole thing.

Re: This is what really happened

[Anonymous Coward]

ASCII art goatse

Re:This is what really happened

[Anonymous Coward]

There was also an ASCII-art Orion slave girl dancing... but you had to print her on a green-screen CRT monitor!

Re:This is what really happened

[Anonymous Coward]

Is held the secret that Sulu was gay.

I know!

[mitcheli]

It said to never hire J J Abrams.

Cluelessness

[Anonymous Coward]

> According to Cobb, the majority of the disks were 1980s-era 5.25-inch double-density disks capable of storing a whopping 160KB—that's kilobytes—or about one-tenth the capacity you can get on a $1 USB thumb drive today. Cobb said a few of the disks were formatted in DOS, but most of them were from an older operating system called CP/M.

Who wrote TFA is clueless. 160 kb is one tenth of current USB thumb drives? Yeah, sure, we get 1,5 Mb those... orders of magnitude matter!

Re:Cluelessness

[HarrySquatter]

It said 1/10th of what you could get on a $1 thumb drive. Reading comprehesion ftw.

Re:Cluelessness

[amRadioHed]

On Amazon you can get drives ranging from 2-8 GB in the 1-2 dollar range. There's also a 128MB one for a cent. Any way you parse it, the numbers are way off.

Re:Cluelessness

[alzoron]

It's trivial to find 1Gb+ flash drives for $1.

Re:Cluelessness

[Anonymous Coward]

They throw them at anyone passing by for 0$ these days....

Re:Cluelessness

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

If only SPI flash ICs had that capacity for the same price.

Re:Cluelessness

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not trivial to find reliable ones for $1. I have quite a collection that I carry around... free ones died rapidly. The first one that I bought, and the oldest -- a rather expensive one ($15-20 for 2GB, I think) -- in my pocket has survived dropping, throwing in random places, heat and cold, and has been around for years.

Re:Cluelessness

[Megane]

The thing it, it should be relatively easy to read 5 1/4" CP/M disks on an 286/386/486 era PC with the right software to talk to the disk controller chip directly. The big low-level difference was 512-byte sectors in MS-DOS vs (usually) 128-byte sectors in CP/M. Most other 8-bit era floppies used 256-byte sectors. Some old PC disk controller chips couldn't handle single-density format. But if they were 8-inch CP/M disks it would have taken real work to read them.

Re:Cluelessness

[Anonymous Coward]

I think SPI flash tends to be NOR flash, rather than NAND. I'm sure you can get NAND chips, after all, there are just normal ICs + a controller in those flash drives.

Ultimately lost?

[WillAffleckUW]

I see you have no idea how our ICBMs are run.

CP/M.

Try again, n00b.

I was coding before you were in diapers.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you learn to be an asshole before the rest of us were in diapers, as well? Or did that take years of practice?

Re:Ultimately lost?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

I was coding before they invented diapers.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[gstoddart]

In fairness, it did lose. Nobody is going to go out and buy a new CP/M system.

That there are still ancient machines running this stuff surprises nobody. But, let's face it, everybody knows it's antiquated.

What people often fail to realize is that antiquated technology which still works is far more useful than the brand new hotness which can't do the same thing.

Because what people often fail to realize is that bomb-proof code (no pun intended in your case) which has been optimized to fit into a small memory footprint and been running for decades does exactly what it's supposed to, and does it well.

All these kiddies forget that you couldn't just write bloated code and then suggest people go buy more RAM. Well, they don't forget it, they have no idea of what it meant to have to squeeze code into what is now considered trivial amounts of RAM.

I remember having to cram some sparse information into the tiniest amount of memory I could devise because more memory wasn't an option. Meanwhile a friend who had admin perms just assumed he could have a huge whack of virtual memory on the VAX and didn't care about how he stored it. The prof ended up stealing how I did it for his own stuff, because accounting for architecture mine was about 10x faster as a result of being 100x smaller in memory -- precisely because wasting memory wouldn't work and I needed to create a new data structure to get it done.

Nowadays the idea of optimizing for performance or memory gets you looked at like you've lost your mind. "Why optimize when you can have more memory or CPU?" Write shit code now and don't worry about it. Of course, the problem is once you realize it's shit code you can't fix the underlying problem because your 'elegant' code isn't capable of being fixed.

Hmmm ... where was I ... oh yeah, I had an onion on my belt, because that was the style ... ;-)

Re:Ultimately lost?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I was coding before they invented assholes.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[lucm]

Question is: will you still be coding when you're back in diapers?

Not in a cool startup that's for sure.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowadays the idea of optimizing for performance or memory gets you looked at like you've lost your mind. "Why optimize when you can have more memory or CPU?" Write shit code now and don't worry about it. Of course, the problem is once you realize it's shit code you can't fix the underlying problem because your 'elegant' code isn't capable of being fixed.

The idea isn't gone completely. In EE it is still considered.
Often you can buy more memory, but the cost can't be hidden behind "memory is cheap".
If you can get the same program to work on a device that has 512b memory instead of 2k then your device that you are going to manufacture millions of will be cheaper.
Throwing in a 32bit CPU with several hundreds of kilobytes of ram won't make you competitive.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[Sowelu]

I'm certain I'll still be coding if I go old and senile. Probably nothing too exciting, but I could find a copy of QB45 and code like I was a kid again.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[mikael]

That was like the days of early PC game programming on EGA and VGA. A system would be lucky to have 512K of memory space available for use, with everything else used for device drivers, extended memory, expanded memory, BIOS, windows. a VGA card with 1 Mbyte of memory and a pixblitter was a luxury along with a sound card that could play MIDI.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[sexconker]

I invented coding.

Guy below me invented inventing, though.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[NormalVisual]

I remember having to cram some sparse information into the tiniest amount of memory I could devise because more memory wasn't an option.

It's often still like that in the embedded world. Hand these folks one of the original TI Launchpad experimenter boards and see what they think of a 256 byte memory limit.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[NormalVisual]

And then it was fun cramming as much code into the flyback period as you possibly could. Still have my copy of Abrash's Black Book. :-)

Re:Ultimately lost?

[Anonymous Coward]

I invented in... damnit!

Re:Ultimately lost?

[silentcoder]

Interestingly the Unix philosophy largely abandoned that idea much earlier - back in 1969 already. The unix philosophy says:

First make it work
Then make it work right
Then make it work fast

Of course it's a trade-off but even back in 1969 it was obvious that memory-squeezing has significant downsides in terms of design and when it's not required it shouldn't be done. Now of course when it is required, it's a useful skill - but that has been a niche area for a long time.
Interestingly - the original Unix tools still did a lot of memory squeezing, but that was because of the low memory of the machines it was written on which meant that tools were forced to use paging-buffers and such as it was simply not possible to write reliable code if you loaded data straight to memory by default so it had to be a case of read-process-free-read. When GNU started in 1983 ram had already massively increased - so the GNU tools loaded "all into memory" by default. That remains how GNU tools do things, because even if you run out of memory - swap is cheap in that environment and not paging makes your code simpler - which makes it more reliable and easier to maintain (and faster too). Swap is an interesting version of that trade-off, it achieves exactly what the old unix paging code did - but it does it on the kernel level which means the mechanisms for dealing with "too much data to read at once" is now handled centrally by one piece of software and bugs can be fixed in one place - rather than complexity being added to every tool individually.

Even then - there will always be cases where paging data remains the best approach. Video players for example readily read files which may well be much larger than the memory in the box, swapping them out would be a massive performance loss in an application where that would destroy usability - so video players often use their own paging-buffer code.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[uninformedLuddite]

I was coding when you were in my diapers

Re:Ultimately lost?

[RockDoctor]

But you're a deuterostome. Before there was a brain to house a "you" in any shape or form, your body had an arsehole.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[Anonymous Coward]

The unix philosophy says:

First make it work
Then make it work right
Then make it work fast

That is not the Unix philosophy, or even part of it.

Re:Ultimately lost?

[silentcoder]

Yes, it is indeed a critical part of the unix philosophy.
Generally known as the rule of optimization which The Art of Unix Programming expresses as:
"Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it"

http://catb.org/esr/writings/t...

Notice how the rule of optimization is expressed by people like Kernighan and Knuth - the kind of people who helped create the unix philosophy ?

pcworld = crap

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot. Stop lecturing us about what CP/M was.

And get off my lawn.

Re:pcworld = crap

[arth1]

My thoughts exactly. If there is one place where you do not have to explain what CP/M is, it's here.

Re:pcworld = crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone please explain how CP/M relates to "stuff that matters"? :-D

Re:pcworld = crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Please. Slashdot is no longer the stronghold of geekdom that you make it out to be. Probably never really was. I see all kinds of technical mistakes in the comments around here... and when it comes to science? Just forget it. The dorks around here don't know anything about science that they didn't glean from MythBusters and even most of that is filled with errors.

Re:pcworld = crap

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Really! And what is a story only of interest to high-born nerds doing on this political web site?

Re:pcworld = crap

[lucm]

My thoughts exactly. If there is one place where you do not have to explain what CP/M is, it's here.

Exactly. We all know what CP/M is and we all know that CPC has a much better ROI and CTR.

Re:pcworld = crap

[GameboyRMH]

It's way older than me and I've never used it and didn't know what CP/M stood for, but even I'm vaguely aware that it's an ancient operating system.

Re:pcworld = crap

[Coren22]

I see all kinds of technical mistakes in the comments around here...

You must be reading APK posts.

Re:pcworld = crap

[Anonymous Coward]

"What CP/M was"? This is Slashdot: CP/M is.

Re:pcworld = crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Pfft! We know what CP/M is, but what is this "DOS" you speak of?

Re:pcworld = crap

[arth1]

Yeah. Pfft! We know what CP/M is, but what is this "DOS" you speak of?

Half a beer.

Stay thirsty, my friend.

Re:pcworld = crap

[wonkavader]

Quick summary: It's what Seattle DOS ripped off. Seattle DOS was what Bill Gates bought and sold to IBM, labelled MS-DOS.

Re:pcworld = crap

[HornWumpus]

It ripped off VMS and was ripped off in turn. That's how it went before software patents.

Re:pcworld = crap

[cthulhu11]

That was my first thought as well

Re:pcworld = crap

[cthulhu11]

The "stuff that matters" thing is clearly tongue-in-cheeck, witness how many articles about video games and Linux get posted here.

Re:pcworld = crap

[Anonymous Coward]

QDOS was as much a "rip off" of CP/M as the BIOS you're using is a "rip off" of IBM's.

It's a work-alike, but Paterson built it from scratch - he didn't copy any of CP/M's code, just the interfaces.

"Custom OS"

[Erbo]

Some sources claim that Roddenberry's computers ran a "custom OS." However, in those days, CP/M was often customized for different brands of computers, which used different disk formats and layouts (for whatever reason). Roddenberry's machine may have used a particularly obscure layout.

They do mention that the disks had about a 160 Kb capacity, which was fairly standard for Shugart 5-1/4" floppy drives of the time.

Re:"Custom OS"

[drinkypoo]

They do mention that the disks had about a 160 Kb capacity, which was fairly standard for Shugart 5-1/4" floppy drives of the time.

That's why they're still readable. The disks with the lowest density (barring really early and crappy 8" formats) are your basic 5.25" floppies. 360k PC floppies would regularly remain readable for much longer than we actually used them, and if you're only using one side then you do even better.

Re:"Custom OS"

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

You know what else was fairly standard at the time? Wearing an onion on your belt.

Re:"Custom OS"

[mikael]

ICL used to produce Quadro PC's. They had the ability to have four different DOS command line screens toggled using [Alt] and a function key.

Re:"Custom OS"

[sexconker]

Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say.

Re:"Custom OS"

[wyHunter]

Jeez I was such a geek at the time, I didn't even do that.

Re:"Custom OS"

[Megane]

From what I've seen back in the day, the main difference in CP/M disk "formats" was 1) the number of sectors/tracks/sides, and 2) the offset to the directory. The OS itself was stored at the beginning of the disk and could very a little in size. They also couldn't be very big. Back in the early '80s I helped keep a business's computer working. It ran CP/M on a 5 megabyte hard drive. The hard drive had four partitions. The fourth may have been a runt partition, but they wouldn't have been much bigger than the 1.2 megabytes of a DSDD 77-track 8" floppy drive.

Re:"Custom OS"

[david_thornley]

All the 5.25" non-Apple double density setups I heard of (which is not all of them) were using the Western Digital 1791 (I invite corrections in case I haven't remembered this right) floppy disk controller. It was limited in what it could do, so it would be possible to read the disk through a 1791 controller and have all the data blocks to play with.

Re:"Custom OS"

[MightyMartian]

Aye, lad. Back in ye olden times, the programmer came prepared with garlic and a stave, lest the vampires attack, or a foiul Roundhead try to steal his code, or a Papist write yonder virus to cause great disruption. Did thou thinkest 'twas ever different?

Re:"Custom OS"

[hawk]

> CP/M was often customized for different brands of computers,

No.

CP/M had no standard format for 5.25" disks. That wasn't an "often" customized; you made your format, and used CP/M to get binary compatibility.

Some late entrants such as Kaypro were capable of reading many formats, and sometimes a machine could be programmed to read other formats, but it wasn't that CP/M got customized to a format, but adapted to use what the machine had.

hawk, who was there

p.s. CP/M had byte 3, which could redirect IO; it had four two bit fields to map logical devices to physical, making it easy to send, for example the screen output to the printer. There was no equivalent in CP/M 86 or QDOS, err, MSDOS.

Re:"Custom OS"

[mountaineer76]

I think what you're thinking of is the ICL PC Quattro - which didn't run DOS, it ran Concurrent CP/M 86. I used to have one, and yes it did allow each terminal to run four different login screens - the system unit also allowed you to connect up to 4 separate terminal units. Had a colossal 10MB hard drive too - sadly it took up a lot of space and ended up being unceremoniously scrapped (into landfill too - before the days of even attempted recycling!). I still have the original system floppies along with an original copy of SuperCalc 2 - never tried reading the disks since then though.

Re:"Custom OS"

[Lew-the-nerd]

In the early-mid 80's I used a portable computer (sewing machine form factor) called a Zorba that would boot in one of 20 or 30 CPM formats depending on floppy disk used.

Re:"Custom OS"

[tipo159]

They do mention that the disks had about a 160 Kb capacity, which was fairly standard for Shugart 5-1/4" floppy drives of the time.

That's why they're still readable. The disks with the lowest density (barring really early and crappy 8" formats) are your basic 5.25" floppies. 360k PC floppies would regularly remain readable for much longer than we actually used them, and if you're only using one side then you do even better.

Someone that I know who is familiar with this effort reports that the filesystem layout was custom and software had to be written to sort through it and separate the files from the metadata as well as converting file formats to something that could be used by the Roddenberry folks.

Re:"Custom OS"

[ChrisMaple]

A sample BIOS was available from Digital Research (the company that made CP/M), in case you needed to adapt your computer to different hardware. "Custom OS" may have meant nothing more than a custom BIOS.

Re:"Custom OS"

[mikael]

Yes, that's the one ... used to run a custom scripting application to monitor ICL bridges and network traffic.

No big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone with a Commodore 128 and a 1571 disk drive or 128D should be able to work with CP/M files once they've been read... and the 128 should also be able to read the disks themselves.

Re:No big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone with a Commodore 128 and a 1571 disk drive or 128D should be able to work with CP/M files once they've been read... and the 128 should also be able to read the disks themselves.

If you have a specific "custom" program that was "free" back in those days, you could use the hardware mentioned above to read and write many different disk formats, even TRUE custom formats (never used by anyone else) because you had the source code. That 1571 disk drive was capable of many astonishing technical feats.

Re:No big deal

[Neo-Rio-101]

Yep! The Big Blue Reader could also read files from DOS formatted floppies and copy them out to CBM formatted floppies. ....and there are many devices for copying CBM floppies to modern computers (like the ZoomFloppy device)

Yeah, the 1571 was an ace drive.

Re:No big deal

[ioliver]

A couple of years ago, I recovered data off some 5 1/4" floppies that were written in 1987/88. The problem was that the data has just plain rotted and a disk controller wouldn't read any of them. I tried pulling off individual sectors, but maybe only got 25%. I then bought a "Catweasel" card designed to read Amiga disks on a PC, found some Linux driver code, and started hacking. I wrote some Python to parse the raw data pulled off the disk, extract what it could by ignoring sector headers (mostly broken), looking for sync marks, and then playing guessing games around areas with bad MFM clock bits to get the CRCs to work. My code then spat out a file of what it had managed to get along with "goodness" flags for that pass. Over multiple passes, with merging of files to keep best copy of each sector, I managed to get 100% of the data off the disks but it took around three months of hacking around. All I had to do then was find a cracked version of the proprietary DOS backup software (Fastback) on a Russian hack site, run it in a dosbox, feed it the floppy image files one by one, and my data all came back. It was about 50k lines of x86 code (and same again in 68k) for a game called Carrier Command that I wrote in the 80s (wikipedia is your friend). I'm considering making it available at some point so people can see how bad my coding was back then!

Re:No big deal

[Reziac]

There was a DOS utility that could read CP/M disks too, I suppose it loaded a CP/M emulator, but it let you use CP/M disks in an ordinary DOS PC. At the time you could download it from any decent BBS.

We all know what was on those disks...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was Gene's ASCII alien porn collection.

We should do the noble thing and put it all on a torpedo and shoot it out into space.

Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[Lumpy]

CP/M machines are readily available on ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html...

Click buy it now, whip out the credit card, wait for delivery.

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[drinkypoo]

Click buy it now, whip out the credit card, wait for delivery.

The last CP/M machine I had was too heavy for UPS. you'd have to ship it on a pallet. Granted, it did have dual 8" floppy drives...

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[Frederic54]

My last CP/M machine was my Amstrad CPC6128, Z80, 128K RAM, I had a 5.25" disk drive and used CPM 2.2 and CPM 3.0 on it, I had Turbo Pascal, DBaseII, and so on. It was mid 80s.
It was only a few pounds, the computer was in the keyboard.

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[drinkypoo]

128kB? Fancy. Before my Altos I had a Kaypro 4, which had dual 5.25" floppies inside next to its little green monitor. Sadly, it emulated an adm3a.

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Click buy it now, whip out the credit card, wait for delivery, see that it was damaged in transport, fill out a claims form, send it in the mail, wait for a pre-made generic reply that has nothing to do with your claim, call customer service, get put on wait with shitty over-amplified background music with insipid voice-over about how your call is important, get an answer from someone in India who barely speaks english, try to explain the problem for half an hour before asking to speak to the manager, wait another hour on hold with the shitty music and voice-over, get someone who tells you the manager is not available and left two hours ago, slam the phone down on the table and break it because you forgot you were using a cellphone and you can't angrily hang up anymore.

Well, that was easy.

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[wjcofkc]

Mod Lumpy up. Thanks for that, I had never considered. I think I'll grab me up a TRS-80 Model III and some debugging manuals while I'm at it. No joke.

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[Megane]

I have a Kaypro-10 around somewhere. The Kaypro-10 has a 10-megabyte hard drive. It was probably the king of CP/M luggables.

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[Megane]

Anyone in the Austin TX area (or San Antonio) want a bunch of TRS-80 Model IV and 4P stuff? Reply while this thread is still alive and I'll get in contact with you. I will NOT ship them, but I can deliver personally anywhere in the I-35/45/10 triangle on a day-trip if you're really serious.

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[NormalVisual]

And rest secure in the knowledge that in many cases, they're made up of entirely off-the-shelf parts and are easy to fix if something breaks. Part of the reason I prefer the Apple II+ over the IIe.

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[david_thornley]

Get a Model 4 or 4P. The III had the ROM fixed in the first 12K of memory, and I think the memory-mapped screen on top of that, so you couldn't use standard CP/M. (I do remember running memory tests on the screen memory just to watch it.) The 4 and 4P had accessible RAM all over, and could use bog-standard CP/M and CP/M software.

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[Anonymous Coward]

My last CP/M machine was a DIY-assembly based on an AMD AthlonXP @1GHz, about. It had 512MB RAM, and several GB of disk drive. It was lighning fast!

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[Anonymous Coward]

> The last CP/M machine I had was too heavy for UPS. you'd have to ship it on a pallet. Granted, it did have dual 8" floppy drives...

It must have been some kind of server (or a precursor).

Most CP/M machines I've seen were the size of the original IBM-PC XT, itself modeled on them, but somewhat lighter since many used plastic cases (a la Apple II) instead of metal ones.

And the 5.25" floppy disk came a lot earlier than the IBM-PC and DOS.

Heck, actually, if memory serves me well, I seem to have read they found "(C) Digital Research" inside DOS, so actually CP/M _was_ DOS.

They copied the system from one company and the name from Apple (which had Apple DOS 3.3). And now people ask why they can't innovate... what would possibly be the reason?

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[Anonymous Coward]

International conglomerates with Indian call centres sell obsolete hardware by the ton on eBay? Who knew?!

Re:Really? IT's not that hard to read CP/M disks

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

No, the indian call centre is for the shipping company. I won't name it but it probably contains the letters SPU.

So they found the pilot in color?!?

[bobbied]

Yippee!

So he kept an MP4 of the pilot in color on all those disks eh?

Seriously... It's probably just a bunch of ASCII Art...

Floppies never got more reliable, either

[damn_registrars]

I had floppies in the 90s and beyond that were terrible for longevity. More than once I had a carefully handled 3.5" DSHD floppy eat shit while being carried from one computer to another in the same room.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[drinkypoo]

I had floppies in the 90s and beyond that were terrible for longevity. More than once I had a carefully handled 3.5" DSHD floppy eat shit while being carried from one computer to another in the same room.

The best data densities were on SSDD 5.25" floppies, formatted out to 360k or less. The worst in relation to the oxide size, 1.2 MB. 1.44MB is a bit better, but still not great.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Tablizer]

I'd always make 2 copies of anything important on different disks. Duplicate copies are still good advice because bleep happens.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[damn_registrars]

From my experience the 5.25" floppy disks in general were slightly more reliable, but the drives went out of style early enough that it didn't matter. You couldn't really convince people - mac users especially but plenty of other PC users as well - to retrofit 5.25" floppy drives into their computers. Even worse, to the best of my knowledge nobody ever made a USB 5.25 floppy drive which was arguably the final nail in the coffin for that format.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[damn_registrars]

(that should say physical form, not format. my error)

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[drinkypoo]

You couldn't really convince people - mac users especially but plenty of other PC users as well - to retrofit 5.25" floppy drives into their computers.

There was a moment when companies sold half-height dual-format drives with both slots, but the reality is that most people hadn't seen a 360k floppy in ages, and a 1.2MB floppy frequently failed before you could read it anyway.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you were talking about the 90s. You're a total n00b. Don't try to tell us about floppy disk anything. By the time you rolled around most media manufacturers were putting out crap. I have original disks from the 80s that my C64 can still read. I bet you my 1541s are older than you are. LuLZz!

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[CAIMLAS]

I lived in a dorm in the 90s, without access to a network. To use a network, particularly the Internet, I had to travel to the lab where there was very slow dialup access.

There was more than one occasion when I, and a friend of mine, were trying to get files larger than a MB or two (porn, installers) down to our rooms from the lab. It was maybe 25 yards of hall, a cement stairway, and then another 50 yards of hall - all told along the shortest route. We never could figure out why well over half of the disk images were bad.

This happened over a period of years. We eliminated the possibility of the floppy drives, or the disks, being bad: we could transport between our rooms and read, but if we brought the floppies up to the lab, they were then largely unreadable either in the lab, or back in our rooms without being written. It didn't matter the brand or quality of disk, either.

Turns out it was the school bell, which was about 60 years old, in the stairwell. The damn thing put out an EMF field so strong it wiped the disks - and could turn white noise on an AM radio into tones.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[damn_registrars]

I bet you my 1541s are older than you are.

I probably shouldn't feed this troll, but I am indeed older than any 1541 I have ever seen. As best I can tell the first 1541 was made in 1983, I am certainly older than that.

I mentioned floppies from the 90s only because they are the ones I have most recently used extensively. I have almost zero floppy disks that I have written to since 2000.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Anonymous Coward]

I always preferred Zips.

I am still mad Zips lost out to HDDs in general. I fucking hate HDDs with a passion, simply because they come with circuitry on them, circuitry that tends to be the biggest failure on drives (especially Seagate crap).

Zip technology, improved to current HDD standards, would be more than capable of similar densities.
We have precise head aligning technology that can hover easily just nm above the platters, we have printer heads capable of printing nm-scale.
The biggest concern, obviously, is the opening and closing part. But by using a sealed compartment and even create a vacuum or at the least a lower pressure, we could reach similar speeds.
The disc readers themselves would have been more expensive to build, but the price would be offset via disk cassettes just like the expensive price of printers is pushed on to ink cartridges and accessories.

I am just glad SSDs are now a thing. They still have a little uncertainty with them, but even a good chunk of failures leave drives readable.
Still hard to recover an SSD if it full-on shits itself though. Then again, the same is true of a head-crash incident in HDDs. (RIP laptop drive)

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Megane]

HD floppy disks in the '90s were pretty crappy. Ah, the fun of trying to install Slackware from floppies and having disk errors.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[NormalVisual]

I bet you my 1541s are older than you are.

And I'll bet my Disk IIs are older than your 1541s, and will read/write a hell of a lot faster. Having said that, I have quite a few Amiga 3.5" disks from 1986 or so that still read just fine. I've since transferred them to ADF files, and almost all my Amiga stuff gets done in an emulator now.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[NormalVisual]

We have precise head aligning technology that can hover easily just nm above the platters, we have printer heads capable of printing nm-scale.

Zips wouldn't be able to come close to the areal density or speeds of today's hard disks. They're still floppies, just with better media and a better enclosure. Plastic film that thin isn't dimensionally stable enough to work under the conditions required even if you could get the oxide coating fine enough.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[macs4all]

From my experience the 5.25" floppy disks in general were slightly more reliable, but the drives went out of style early enough that it didn't matter. You couldn't really convince people - mac users especially but plenty of other PC users as well - to retrofit 5.25" floppy drives into their computers. Even worse, to the best of my knowledge nobody ever made a USB 5.25 floppy drive which was arguably the final nail in the coffin for that format.

Well, I couldn't find a pre-built drive, per se; but here is a 5.25 USB floppy controller/adapter that should work with most floppy mechanisms.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't try to cover up for being a common shitbag with no clue. We see through your dumb shit, lying fucktard.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Anonymous Coward]

nd I'll bet my Disk IIs are older than your 1541s, and will read/write a hell of a lot faster.
 
Durrrrr. What the fuck are you even talking about? Do you go out of your way to miss the point only to agree with a poster at a later point? I bet you're a real annoying fuck to deal with... and you probably don't bathe often either.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[wonkavader]

The disk was fine until you put it in the other drive. Floppies work fine in any drive, no matter how badly aligned it was. Then when you went to another disk drive and wrote ANYTHING, you'd written data half in one track, half in another, thus destroying the data for the first computer.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[NormalVisual]

Oooh, that stung.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Anonymous Coward]

That was normal for floppies of the day. You could write to a brand new disk, eject it, re-insert it and the files were corrupted. Good times.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so glad I attended college at a university that was part of the NCAR NSF net. 100 Mbps unfiltered Ethernet access to the Internet in 1990's was beyond amazing. I was the king of Napster and Quake III servers.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Anonymous Coward]

The best data densities were on SSDD 5.25" floppies,

Yep, the "Same Shit Different Day" floppies

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[AmiMoJo]

In the late 80s and early 90s there were plenty of quality, reliable floppies around. Back when people like Sony were making them. I still have some that are perfectly readable now.

In the mid 90s the bottom started to fall out of the market. All the good manufacturers left and by the late 90s you could only buy the kind of crap you describe. Those of us who needed standard density disks found that the cheap HD ones often failed to format out of the box.

Re:Floppies never got more reliable, either

[Anonymous Coward]

I had floppies in the 90s and beyond that were terrible for longevity. More than once I had a carefully handled 3.5" DSHD floppy eat shit while being carried from one computer to another in the same room.

You're not supposed to drag your feet on the carpet when sneaker-netting!

Nothing unusual about CP/M

[squiggleslash]

It has a very simple file layout. A more likely cause of the problem is that computers that ran CP/M typically had unusual disk drives - that is, the number of tracks, sectors per track, etc, varied tremendously between manufacturer.

The file system itself though? Not a problem. It's simpler than FAT. It's so simple it can be easily reverse engineered with a hexeditor, even if you don't have any documentation and have never heard of CP/M before (been a while, but from memory: first few sectors after boot are a directory, using 32 byte blocks - 12 bytes for file name and user number, then the remainder identify the sector clusters - called extents in CP/M jargon - the file occupies, with multiple entries used if the file used more than 20 extents.)

Re:Nothing unusual about CP/M

[The Optimizer]

As I recall, it was common for the CPU in machines of that era to interact heavily with the Floppy Controller during the I/O process: listening for the sync hole (a real hole in the floppy), driving the stepper motor, transferring bytes, intra-sector timings, stop/start bits, etc. All of which could be further impacted by the system clocks and even the memory wait states used in that particular machine.

There were many early "homebuilt" CP/M machine from sources like HeathKit, Northstar, etc, so there could have been quite a few variants in terms of the actual magnetic data on the disk.

For some real fun, look up how the CompuColor II (circa 1979) controlled it's floppy disks -- it used a serial IO chip in developer/debug mode to save on having a dedicated floppy controller chip.

Re: Nothing unusual about CP/M

[Anonymous Coward]

Same types of issues with tape drives on cp/m. I remember needing take an oscilloscope on service calls to calibrate the tape controllers. That was fun. Much more work than the 8" Shutegard floppies that had a sticker on the drive fly wheel. The segments on the sticker "stood still" under florescent lights (synced to 60hz).

MS DOS was mostly copied from CP/M anyway. Gates changed the command names and some syntax but that's about it.

Re:Nothing unusual about CP/M

[Anonymous Coward]

Figuring out how that version of CP/M stored files would be just the beginning. The files themselves were probably in the undocumented proprietary format of some long-obsolete word processor.

Re:Nothing unusual about CP/M

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I'd be very surprised if CP/M disk documentation isn't still around someplace, even allowing for the variety of physical formats used (mostly in an effort to lock people in to a particular company's stuff, of course). The bigger problem, once you can read the data, is figuring out what created it and how it was stored. Unless of course he used Wordstar...

Re:Nothing unusual about CP/M

[sjames]

Not to mention that the data had to be encoded so that the strings of 1s and 0s wouldn't be too long in order to be able to read it again. So if you just spin it at the right RPM and read it out, you won't get recognizable data.

Re:Nothing unusual about CP/M

[markana]

They might be hard-sector floppies, like my Northstar uses. 10-sector, single-sided with physical holes around the hub. Those things were always more expensive and hard to find than the regular soft-sector ones.

Re:Nothing unusual about CP/M

[Anonymous Coward]

Tracks/sectors etc are not a problem in my experience. There are a bunch of programs available that will read any arbitrary disk format, and in my experience (I've written a few emulators and dealt with a bunch of odd cpm format disks) they work just fine. You might have some issues on some modern drives (different densities can cause problems), but that's pretty rare, and in any case secondhand drives are cheap and most won't have issues.

As to weird file formats: they can be problematic, but usually if you open them in a hex editor you can at least extract the text no problem.

Re:Nothing unusual about CP/M

[dissy]

A more likely cause of the problem is that computers that ran CP/M typically had unusual disk drives - that is, the number of tracks, sectors per track, etc, varied tremendously between manufacturer.

I still have an Apple II ZVX4 controller card to connect to a shugart 8" floppy drive, and those drives were seemingly designed around having a different track/sector layout between identical model drives from the same manufacturer.

The drive had two adjustable POTs to slightly change exactly where within the region a track should roughly be to where it actually is, and from what I remember also being able to slightly adjust the rotational speed.

This was explained in the manual as a method to provide compatibility with floppy disks from other computers using the exact same hardware setup, let alone different brands makes and models.

For some reason I also seem to remember similar adjustment trims and pots, although internally, in the original apple disk II drive (The full height, typically black rough plastic face, ribbon cable based drives), but it wouldn't surprise me if such things remained internal for the newer "no user serviceable parts inside" disk II drives in standard beige at half height with "standard" db25 cables.

I guess it was all worth it to have just over 1 megabyte of storage per disk (600k per side) compared to the 5.25" disks that stored 160k (80k per side) under dos 3 and prodos.

Those 10 megabyte hard drives were completely out of my price range as a kid :P

Re:Nothing unusual about CP/M

[gl4ss]

the article is shoddily written because it's not the problem that they're cp/m or that cp/m is some magic or some shit like that.

it's that having the right drive to read the data off the disc in the first place is the problem. however, they should have known what drive it was that was in the old computer.

Re:Nothing unusual about CP/M

[Anonymous Coward]

CompuColor II tech info: http://www.compucolor.org/tech...

Re: Is this really the best Slashdot can offer us?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, preserving pop culture history is more important. Who gives a shit about infighting amongst Linux pundits?

Steamy emails

[khelms]

to Majel Barrett.

Re:Steamy emails

[Anonymous Coward]

Or any of the other women he was involved with, for that matter.

Re:Steamy emails

[Tablizer]

"Data shot first"

The disks contained...

[AmazingRuss]

...ASCII porn. They think. It's really hard to tell.

Re:The disks contained...

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Did they try viewing it in both 40 and 80 columns?

Re:The disks contained...

[khelms]

They're having trouble finding a dot matrix printer to format them on.

Re:The disks contained...

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Dot matrix printers? You mean to tell me you don't even know that some computers can run in text modes?

Star Wars fanfics, mostly.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's rather embarrassing.

Paul Allen Could Help

[MonkeyTrial]

Paul Allen has a strong interest in old computer technology (Living Computer Museum), and science fiction. I hear he also has some money. They should approach him for help.

Porn. They are full of porn.

[whopis]

Mostly featuring green-skinned Orion slave girls, with the occasional Tellarite orgy thrown in.

It's probably 99% crap

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I respect Gene Roddenberry, but for all the good he did for Star Trek, everything he did wasn't always good or right. To be very blunt, The Next Generation got a lot better when his declining health limited his tinkering with the show. The seasons where he had the most influence on the show, seasons one and two, were the worst ones for the show. Gates McFadden has stated in recent years that she was fired outright at the end of season one over complaints about the sexism in the scripts. Even Patrick Stewart has stated that he thought the season one scripts were too sexist and that he and other cast members were shocked when she was fired. Some writer (don't remember his name) was behind the campaign to fire her. What exactly was Roddenberry's role in this? I don't know. But at the end it seemed like he was maybe still capable of a good idea (ie. the general concept of The Next Generation) but not so much the inner workings of that idea. I'm guessing that maybe there is one good idea buried in there somewhere that Rod Roddenberry can do something with but that's probably about it.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[malditaenvidia]

Don't forget about Wesley Crusher.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[imidan]

Even Patrick Stewart has stated that he thought the season one scripts were too sexist and that he and other cast members were shocked when she was fired.

I mean, seriously, what was with those miniskirts? Women go to space in the future but constantly have to worry about their space miniskirt riding up more than half an inch and showing their underwear? Maybe Sirtis' ghastly lavender jumpsuit was engineered to keep her legs warm. Costume budgets being as they were, they had to leave a lot off the neckline in order to give her pants.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[mikael]

Miniskirts were the fashion back in the 1960's, wanted by customers of the fashion designers.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[jellomizer]

Roddenberry was progressive for the 1960's. But a lot of this is rather conservative for the 1980s and 1990's.
Star Trek trying to keep with Roddenberry ideals gets more and more dated.
While they appear to be utopian, it requires cultures to change and I can't see such changes happening smoothly or not having repercussions in the future.
If we Get rid of Religion, money, and everyone lives for the betterment of society then we will have a happy world... This is bogus.
1. Religion: This is actually not really a cause for war, but something manipulated by people to rally the troops. While we think Religion as a the mystical stuff... It is actually far more complex. This is a belief based on faith. We see similar type of patterns with interpretations of the founding fathers, the life of Abraham Lincoln, views on software licenses. This militant behavior comes to the question are you a pure...
2. Money: Ok we may not need money, but some form of system to make sure the population is doing things that are needed to be done. Jobs that are in shortage but high demand get paid more. Jobs which can be easily filled and are not needed much get paid less. With no incentive people will tend to trend towards the jobs they want to do. So we get a lot of bad poets and street musicians.
3. Betterment of society: Who really wakes up and says I am going to be evil today. Most people try to do the right thing, but there logical reasoning or process may be flawed. As well we can have polar opposite approaches to try to solve problems. Just for example. The poor: Should we give them money so they are not poor. or should not give them money as an incentive to get a job. Now there is also a lot of stuff in the middle, and it is rather complex. But it would just cause a lot of fighting.

 

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[jandrese]

2. Money: Ok we may not need money, but some form of system to make sure the population is doing things that are needed to be done. Jobs that are in shortage but high demand get paid more. Jobs which can be easily filled and are not needed much get paid less. With no incentive people will tend to trend towards the jobs they want to do. So we get a lot of bad poets and street musicians.

This was kind of the point though. Automation had progressed to the point that nobody had to work if they didn't want to, or they could be street musicians and still have a good life.

Obviously it's not completely post-scarcity. Not everybody can have their own Galaxy class starship, or their own planet, etc... But it's more like a souped up socialist paradise where everybody has a guaranteed minimum quality of life and if they want to improve their life they can but if they don't then they won't starve to death or freeze or even have to worry about money. There are no shitty jobs, they've all been automated or replaced by replicators.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[Opportunist]

In a society that has and unlimited power source and that (more or less) perfected complete energy-matter transformation, you run into a huge problem: You cannot force people to work.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[david_thornley]

There was a DS9 episode in which Sisko and crew went back in time and wound up in the events of TOS Trouble with Tribbles. Dax modeled her dress for the doctor, who said he was going to like it in that period. Overall, a very funny episode.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[david_thornley]

There was money in the original series, although you almost never were exposed to it. The shore leave on the station in The Trouble with Tribbles showed trader Cyrano Jones negotiating purchase prices with a man behind a bar (which sold other things than liquor). The interior economy of the Enterprise didn't need money, since everyone got what they needed with no fuss, so we almost never saw it.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[MightyMartian]

I thought most of the Season 1 scripts were Phase 2 scripts that were dusted off, so that seems an odd claim. I agree that the first two seasons were pretty blah in comparison to the middle years, when the show hit its stride. I don't recall anything overtly sexist, save perhaps for Riker's alpha male swagger, but I'm assuming that was because they wanted some sort of James T. Kirk in the show. I do remember Data bedding one of his ship mates, maybe that's what they're talking about.

In reality, Roddenberry wasn't the key writer in Star Trek. He certainly came up with the core ideas, and doubtless had a lot to do with beating the scripts into shape. But probably the person most responsible at least for TOS for the feel of Star Trek was Gene L Coon. Coon invented the Prime Directive, which is a constant through all the series. He also developed characters like Khan, who still stands as one of the best SciFi villains ever, not to mention the Klingons. Coon has never got the recognition he deserved, despite his contributions to Star Trek being just as critical to its success, and to its mythology, as Roddenberry.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[sjames]

Why is that a problem? You also don't need people to work.

There are interesting things that are a value to society but you can get people to do them because they are interesting.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[dissy]

I don't recall anything overtly sexist, save perhaps for Riker's alpha male swagger, but I'm assuming that was because they wanted some sort of James T. Kirk in the show. I do remember Data bedding one of his ship mates, maybe that's what they're talking about.

There is a lot of really horrible season 1 episodes with things like sexism and racism taken to extremes.

The ep you are thinking of was "The Naked Now", although that script was a direct copy from the original series ep "The Naked Time", so I can understand your conclusion regarding having a Kirk figure in TNG.

<enable-nerd level='high'>

But there was also "Justice", a planet of nearly naked people who spend most of their time "playing at making love" (although also attempting to punish Wesley with death for breaking a law he committed no act to break. Although killing Wesley, not sure I want to hold that against them :P )

"Haven" which promotes the forced marriage of Troy against her will as a good thing.
"The Dauphin" in s2 is the same theme just the forced marriage of a non-show regular against her will.

"Angel One" with the planet only women can be in government and men only sex slaves or laborers (not feminism, but sexism against males none the less)

"Up The Long Ladder" where picard forces the peoples of two worlds to forced mating and polygamy/polyandry, where one of those worlds are people consisting of only clones who don't have sex, had sexual reproduction evolved out of their makeup generations past, and find the idea both disgusting and repulsive.
(closest bad analogy I can think of: imagine forced sex with someone of the same gender if you are straight, or with someone of the opposite sex if your not. Next, imagine you are the "lucky" one that gets the forced sex with someone who prefers making their own new holes that you didn't have before)
Picard even makes fun of them and the situation saying "In time they will get used to it, and maybe even enjoy it" followed by laughter of the bridge crew present.
Yes Picard, let's assign to you 5 husbands with forced sex every day and night, and see how much you "maybe even learn to enjoy it" :P

And the worst IMHO is "The Child", where Troy is raped in her sleep and impregnated by an alien being, where multiple times through the show she behaves and talks as if she enjoyed it, and that it was the best experience of her life.
Note she wasn't just referring to having/raising the child, but the entire experience explicitly including the impregnation, despite not being awake during.
No feelings of being violated, not even a "mixed bag" sort of thing, just a wonderful experience through and through.

Some honorable mentions are "Where No One Has Gone Before" awkwardly and painfully exploring all of the joys of man-boy-love between Wesley and that traveler guy.
(Though I admit everything was "only implied" and not outright stated, so it's understandable if one decides to not interpret the show in that way)

Plus "Code of Honor", where in it is shown in the trek universe there actually is a planet of all black people, and they only get the one, with a leader that talks like James Earl Jones with an extra helping of tribal ebonics.
(Disgustingly an episode completely forgotten about a couple years later when writer Michael Baron publicly claimed that black people aren't specifically being excluded from being actors on the show, it's just that in LA there are not many black actors in existence to choose from. Of course obviously not true but this ep proves it isn't even true in his own tiny sphere of influence let alone in general.)

I'm sure you can find even longer lists of sexism and such in trek if you look. These are just the ones that stand out to me personally as particularly embarrassing to have watched.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[Opportunist]

There are still a few things that cannot be replicated. Those crystals still have to be mined as far as I know. Space ships are still being assembled. A few times you get to meet people in the show who actually do have to do work that's not highly fulfilling and inspirational but rather menial and boring.

Why would anyone want to do that?

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[sjames]

Those were more based on the need for a plot than a full imagining. That was robot's work, but robots wouldn't highlight one of today's problem in a futuristic setting designed to bypass a kneejerk reaction.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[Solandri]

But it's more like a souped up socialist paradise where everybody has a guaranteed minimum quality of life and if they want to improve their life they can but if they don't then they won't starve to death or freeze or even have to worry about money. There are no shitty jobs, they've all been automated or replaced by replicators.

It's important to realize that such an economy is highly dependent on cheap energy. Replicator technology basically uses as much energy as a 6 megaton nuke to create a cup of Earl Grey tea (excluding the cup, saucer, and spoon). That's roughly the energy output of a 1 GW nuclear reactor operating for 9.5 months. Or $750 million worth of electricity at the average U.S. price of $0.12 per kWh.

If you look at our modern culture, it's basically the same thing. Higher standard of living is a direct result of access to cheap energy. We don't have to spend 2/3rds of our waking lives working in the fields just to grow enough food for us to eat because we have cheap energy to power machines to do the work for us. If you want to grow a garden for some of your food for entertainment, by all means do so. But don't fall for the fantasy that you can become self-sufficient by doing so. At least not with a lot of manual labor or access to cheap external energy sources to do that labor for you. (The graphic assumes about 2300 kcal/day per person. If you work the fields yourself, you're looking at more like 3500-5000 kcal/day.)

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Replicator technology basically uses as much energy as a 6 megaton nuke to create a cup of Earl Grey tea (excluding the cup, saucer, and spoon).

The problem isn't the energy -- it's almost certainly reasonably well conserved in the translation from hot matter/antimatter to much less hot matter -- but rather with the power requirement. We have no idea what the power requirement is; it might not be exceptionally large for rearranging matter from some sort of hot plasma into less than a litre of hot water.

A relativistic centre-of-momentum calculation (which incidentally is a limit) of an object does not really suggest much about how it was formed. Gravitational collapse is pretty cheap and yet the same naive calculation for E_sun is extremely high. A litre of water can have been produced by melting of ice, condensation of vapour, a reaction between molecular hydrogen and oxygen, a reaction between atomic hydrogen and oxygen, and so forth.

How does a replicator work? Does it use cheap-for-power shortcuts, such as maintaining a store of commonly required molecules, including macromolecules, so that they don't have to be generated from something lower level like atoms? Does it fiddle directly with the field content of the Standard Model fields, forming nucleons out of quark-gluon plasmas? Does it fiddle with some more fundamental field(s)?

We don't even know scale limits. We see plates of food. But we also see large scale assembly work in space docks, rather than entire ships being replicated all-at-once. Why?

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[HornWumpus]

Who really wakes up and says I am going to be evil today.

Evil, good? They are both fine choices.

Bender.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[HornWumpus]

The whole fucking thing is contrived out of a need for plot?

None of it even begins to make any sort of sense except the hack authors needed another tech prop to make their soap opera's 'plot complications' work out.

They clearly have matter-energy conversion, but need dilithium crystals for some plot related reason. They have no money or unfulfilled needs, except when their is a plot related reason. etc etc etc.

Space hippies plot stolen directly from 'Lost in Space'. At least they skipped the 'space hillbillies' plot.

Re:It's probably 99% crap

[jandrese]

Where do your figures for the replicator energy use come from? Are you just converting E=MC^2? IIRC in Star Trek there is a big tank of "replicator mass" that is merely rearranged to form the desired product. Waste products of all kids get converted back into that mass as well.

Given the widespread use of Replicators in Star Trek, it is safe to assume they don't require titanic levels of energy for mundane tasks.

Deja Vu

[geminidomino]

Wasn't JMS (of Babylon 5 fame) in a similar boat last year? ISTR a tweet offering $500 for a drive that would read his ancient pre-DOS floppies. (Probably pretty lowball)

Re:Is this really the best Slashdot can offer us?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Star Trek matters to nerds.

Who the fuck is Gene Roddenberry?

[Anonymous Coward]

And why should we care about all this nonsense?

Re:Who the fuck is Gene Roddenberry?

[Anonymous Coward]

Typing his name in Google and reading the contents of the linked pages should assist you adequately.

Never happened to me

[future assassin]

so fluked out there as we use to download software like Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator from FTP sites which was 40+ 1mb files which then needed to be spliced backtogether. I'd download the files from my buddies computer which had a 56.6K modem while I only had a 14.4 at that time.

Center of Pressure [Re:pcworld = crap]

[Geoffrey.landis]

Indeed,

CP is center of pressure, and CM is center of mass, so CP/M is clearly the center of pressure divided by mass.

Re:Center of Pressure [Re:pcworld = crap]

[AthanasiusKircher]

CP is center of pressure, and CM is center of mass, so CP/M is clearly the center of pressure divided by mass.

Precisely. And the units are obviously number of bulls-eyes*** you win in darts at the bar** per the number of slugs* you get in during the drunken brawl afterward.

* Unit of mass
** Unit of pressure
*** Unit of center :)

It's just a celebrity press release

[mileshigh]

Reading the original article, it's pretty clear the data-recovery company decided to pitch a press release to capitalize their little brush with celebrity. It's a slow tech news season and all, so PCWorld took the bait and published the press release with little change.

People recover CP/M floppies every day. It's a routine job well within any decent recovery company's skill set. The only thing that's special is the Roddenberry connection.

Re:It's just a celebrity press release

[tnk1]

Agreed. CP/M was a popular system for its time. There should be little difficulty in recovering the data from CP/M floppies, particularly if there is sufficient monetary inducement or even hobbyist interest.

Re:It's just a celebrity press release

[wonkavader]

Yes. This press-release really irks me, because it took them a YEAR to do this easy task. They milked this client and then they crow about it?

DOS recoveries were easy, but not CP/M...

[Anonymous Coward]

... until they finally had the brilliant idea of just f**king googling for a solution, I presume.

Overthinking the story.

[westlake]

Or as Popular Science once speculated, a patent for a transporter?

You have a tight budget and a bare 50 minutes to tell your story. Landing the big ship [miniature sets, props and puppetry] will take time and money you don't have. Teleportation is a dirt cheap effect trivially easy to stage that saw its first use in silent films.

Re:Overthinking the story.

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a tight budget and a bare 50 minutes to tell your story.

The real reason why people try to invent things seen on stage: You have a short life, and want it to be interesting -- it's like storytelling has the same constraints as real life!

Re:Overthinking the story.

[jandrese]

Basically they didn't want to have to lug that full size shuttle model out into the desert constantly.

Re:Overthinking the story.

[david_thornley]

Shuttle ops were expensive model work back then, and the writer's guide said to economize elsewhere if you needed to have the shuttle in an episode. It also took time. The transporter took very little time and was an easy special effect.

Re:Overthinking the story.

[hawk]

It wasn't even the time.

They just flat-out didn't have the special effects budget to land the ship every week; the transporter was concocted to solve that.

by the spinoffs, it was simply a plot crutch.

hawk

Encrypted?

[SeaFox]

I'm still not clear on what the summary means when it says "When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work." Is there some reason someone couldn't read these disks on another CP/M machine? I'm pretty sure that operating system wasn't a homebrew project of Roddenberry's...

Re:Encrypted?

[Anonymous Coward]

There were a lot of oddball formats. A PC with the right software can read most of them, but some of the high density and/or hard sectored (physical hole in the disk for the start of each sector!) would take a special drive.
If he used a Kaypro it would be easy. Some thing with Micropolis drives (300k capacity at a time when everyone else got 70k on a 5 inch disk!) would require finding the right drive.

Re:Encrypted?

[david_thornley]

If I still had my old CP/M floppies, and they still worked, I might well be able to read them on my TRS-80 model 4P.

Re:Encrypted?

[NormalVisual]

Or just fix the original machine? Older micros were quite simple, often using widely available microprocessors, memory, and glue logic. There's not much prior to 1983 that can't be fixed with new parts from Mouser/Digikey/whoever, a soldering iron, some time, and possibly a low-end oscilloscope.

Re:Encrypted?

[sjames]

It would have to be a similar model. There was a lot of variation in encoding at the time.

Re:Encrypted?

[dissy]

There's not much prior to 1983 that can't be fixed with new parts from Mouser/Digikey/whoever, a soldering iron, some time, and possibly a low-end oscilloscope.

Not that I agree with GP of course (Kids these days, so spoiled by the little things like "standards" and "compatibility")
But you left one item out of your bill of materials - someone that knows of those things and what to do with them beyond burning themselves :P

For a non-technical person not in the know (or knowing someone that is), that can initially seem pretty expensive, if they even realize it is possible at all.
Keep in mind non-technical people these days believe that when Windows won't boot, the entire computer is broken and needs thrown away and replaced. Even the "I know it's just a software problem but I don't know what to do about it" crowd seems to be dwindling away to nothing.

Ironically, it's pretty likely someone at the data recovery service they paid either had someone like that on staff already, or knows of someone to do work on their own older computers, used to read the media provided by the client.

BTW I don't at all mean to belittle our EE brethren by likening them to a BOM line item, we're all friends here right? Or if not, just call me "Mr Keyboard Pecker" :P

Re:Encrypted?

[wonkavader]

There's this thing in the world called OLD PEOPLE. Turns out they still kinda know how to shamble around and can still twiddle a potentiometer with a plastic tool.

I don't know why the recovery company didn't talk to one of these. Was it the smell? Or was it that they wouldn't be able to bill for a year of work if they got the problem solved in an afternoon?

Re:Encrypted?

[NormalVisual]

For a non-technical person not in the know (or knowing someone that is), that can initially seem pretty expensive, if they even realize it is possible at all.

Of course, and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to have a degree of skill with electronic repair. However, given the value of the data in question, I'm a bit surprised that they didn't appear to find someone qualified to ask whether the machine could be fixed before going the data recovery route.

Re:Encrypted?

[ChrisMaple]

It's quite possible that the device that died was the disk drive. Most used a rubber belt to transmit rotation from a motor to the disk, and rubber doesn't age well. Other possibilities include misaligned or worn heads and dirty heads.

Re:Is this really the best Slashdot can offer us?!

[malditaenvidia]

Why aren't you submitting those stories instead of whining about them not being published, poindexter?

Not difficult if

[Anonymous Coward]

Not difficult if people are aware of the situation. Having a number of drives this is not a problem. Having damaged disks is.

Not difficult if

[Anonymous Coward]

Not difficult if people are aware of the situation. I, aving a number of drives this is not a problem. Having damaged disks is. 8 inch and 5 1/4".

Loads of CP/M formats known to Telcon Zorba

[Anonymous Coward]

A particular CP/M box called Telcon Zorba (Telcon was the maker) had built-in ability to read/write 30 or more different CP/M disk formats
on its B drive. Someone with unknown CP/M disks might do well to find one of these old beasts and use it. I don't believe it could handle
Apple CP/M disks, but was good at the very common Z80 based CP/M formats kicking around.
The disk format is not all that complex but there were many choices of disk number of tracks, sectors per track, and to a degree sector
numbering.

If you had a hard sectored diskette (you could tell those by the large number of holes as I recall) you needed something else to
read them than this kind of box.

I don't understand.

[Last_Available_Usern]

The sum total of my intellectual property is a somewhat popular Warcraft UI and a few websites (so basically, jack shit), and even I have that data spread across a few different backup mediums. If I had anything even remotely as valuable to fans as pretty much ANYTHING Roddenberry made I'd probably have it in multiple safety deposit boxes in different timezones. How could he let that happen?

Re:I don't understand.

[painandgreed]

The sum total of my intellectual property is a somewhat popular Warcraft UI and a few websites (so basically, jack shit), and even I have that data spread across a few different backup mediums. If I had anything even remotely as valuable to fans as pretty much ANYTHING Roddenberry made I'd probably have it in multiple safety deposit boxes in different timezones. How could he let that happen?

Remember that you are talking about a period in time before making backups in case of loss was a thing with the consumer. Also, keep in mind that the idea of copies would be foreign in this time to a lot of writers. Many would type up their manuscripts and papers and then send the only copy in to a publisher with the expectation of it being mailed back if not accepted. Hemingway lost a lot of his work when his wife lost a suitcase carrying a great deal of his stuff. I was in a writer seminar with Harlan Ellison who talked a great deal about how to protect your manuscript with extra coversheets and how to make sure they send it back. Still, I expect that there were copies but they were probably hard copies but only of things that were finished. I wouldn't be surprised if any complete works in these disks match paper print outs that were in his effects.

Re:I don't understand.

[The Optimizer]

Also, it wasn't until the early 60s that the earliest photocopiers appeared, courtesy of Haloid Xerox corporation, and a good decade after that before most people could usually get access to them for personal use.

That brought about a change in thinking. Prior, unless a print shop was going to get involved, you only really thought about making copies at the time of creation - via carbon paper, or mimeographs. People weren't used to the idea of creating copies of something after the fact.

The writing habits of authors and people like Roddenberry were already well developed. Today we think nothing of 'backing things up', but at the time it must have been a strange idea to them.

Re:Is this really the best Slashdot can offer us?!

[Coren22]

Stories end up on the front page based on user's votes. If you read the firehose and upvote topics you think should be front page material, those stories make it to the front page (when enough people upvote them).

No story will ever make it to the front page if it isn't submitted. You really need to start there if you think topics need to be discussed here.

Please!

[nospam007]

Locating a DOS machine with a floppy disk from 25 years ago shouldn't be hard, locating a CP/M machine from 26 years ago can't be that difficult.
I had to walk 3 feet to get those 2 machines and I'm just a hoarder, no specialist.
And the tools to inspect and fix damaged floppies are still on it, after all, lots of games used damaged parts for copy protection in those days.

WTF?

[crackspackle]

"a few of the disks were formatted in DOS, but most of them were from an older operating system called CP/M. CP/M, or Control Program for Microcomputers, was a popular operating system of the 1970s and early 1980s that ultimately lost out to Microsoft's DOS.

I must have gone to the wrong site. This can't be Slashdot.

Re:WTF?

[david_thornley]

To be precise, it was CP/M-86 that lost to Microsoft's PC/MS-DOS, because the latter was adopted as standard by IBM.

Re:Is this really the best Slashdot can offer us?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't you read that comment before you replied to it, shitbrains?

The GP answered that very question before you so stupidly asked it:

I'd be willing to submit those stories, but I know that they likely won't end up on the front page because they aren't about social justice or some other inane topic. I know I'd just be wasting my time by submitting good content.

wholly crap is this slashdot?? :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow,, I must admit, seeing an article like this brings things back to perspective (somewhat).
Seems someone pulled their head out and struck gold...
In the wake of all the crap thats published here(not news 4 nerds) Im glad to find a diamond in the rough..
Was this posted by a DHI affiliate?

Variety of floppy-disk controllers

[Anonymous Coward]

Before NEC produced their uPD765 one-chip floppy-disk controller, each computer maker had to design their own floppy-disk controller. This resulted in many different formats for the same disks using the same drives, the same Z80 processor, and the same CP/M operating system.

Hammer, meet Nail

[tekrat]

So, the article is written from the viewpoint of a complete tech noob. Then, these "data recovery experts" went about the entire process completely wrong.

It's not that difficult to dig up a CP/M machine capable of reading multiple formats -- hell, there's DOS programs that do that as well.

Basically these guys only had a hammer, so every problem looked like a nail.

Sorry. they were just dumb. Frankly, if they'd even done 10 minutes of research on the internet, they could have found a dozen methods to save themselves a ton of work. Instead, they re-invented the wheel to read a few floppy disks.

Re:Hammer, meet Nail

[wonkavader]

No. If they'd done that research, they'd have way less billable hours.

Research bad.

This article is full of b.s.

[Cito]

There was no need to reverse engineer anything. cp/m isn't some lost system and you can even boot it up on today's pc's or in a virtual box. There are also free programs to open any cp/m files.

You can buy usb floppy drives for 8", 5.25", 3.5" sizes for archiving, extremely cheap, like $10-$20. There are MFM utilties to read damaged disks, as floppy drives are MFM based. Very easily done. It's not anything to brag about, a child could do it.

And here's all the free files, boot cp/m, or open any cp/m file, text, etc.
http://www.cpm.z80.de/binary.h...

the article is bullshit sensationalism lies.
no reverse engineering required, I hate fucking liars.

has anyone seen South Park?

This is a fucking advertisement for drivesavers, doing shit EXPENSIVE for what there are FREE TOOLS online you can do yourself.

Ads as articles, Fuck you slashcunt

Re:This article is full of b.s.

[ChrisMaple]

Most, not all, CP/M floppies were MFM. Some old single density disks were FM. A few used something called MMFM (modified modified FM). Wozniak developed an RLL technique for Apple that could have been used on CP/M machines if special hardware been incorporated, but I don't think it ever was,

Accessing CP/M disks is not hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming these didn't do anything too funky (8" disks, non-standard hardware) I can think of at least 3 programs that you can use to access old disks in a whole stack of CP/M formats. All you need is a linux box, a floppy drive of an appropriate size (3.5 or 5.25) and a bit of patience to play pick-the-format from the list of CP/M formats. The only gotcha is that some floppy drives don't play nice with single and double density disks, but in my experience that is rarely an issue.

Hope someone with a clue gets involved before they do anything stupid like stick the disks in a drive running windows and blindly click ok when asked about formatting.

Re:Is this really the best Slashdot can offer us?!

[nukenerd]

OK, his reason is an assumption on his part - one that he has not bothered to verify.

Re:Is this really the best Slashdot can offer us?!

[Anonymous Coward]

fucktards like you dribble on and on and on endlessly about how you hate systemd gnome3 GPL SJWs and firefox *all the fucking time* in *every fucking thread*, and you still want more, just fuck off already you are so fucking boring boring boring cunts just die already.
Thank you.

Not that crazy

[radish]

Back in the early 90's I worked in a repair shop that specialized in the Amstrad PCW, which was a CP/M machine that was very popular with authors in the UK. Most of the ones I saw used 3" disks (which are...weird...in many ways) and frequently blew up due to the unfortunate design feature of having the RAM & CPU on the same circuits as the printer port. Unplug the printer while powered on and you're pretty likely to see smoke and need a repair.

Anyway, I can't see how repairing the machine or just reading the disks on something else would really be that hard.

"lost" due to cp/m?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Those machines are everywhere..

Idiots.

cpmcp linux man page ..

[Marcomasino]

"The DOS recoveries were easy once a drive was located, but the CP/M disks were far more work."

cpmcp - copy files from and to CP/M disks

PC-Alien / OmniFlop

[gadfium]

In the mid-1980s I had a program called PC-Alien which ran on an MS-Dos machine and which could read almost any undamaged CP/M formatted disk. There is a more recent program which appears to have similar capabilites: OmniFlop, but I have no experience of using this. Such a program means a standard IBM PC, still reasonably commonly available, could read the undamaged disks rather than searching for an even older and rarer CP/M machine.

Recovering Apple ][ disks without an Apple ][

[mmogilvi]

Possibly useful if you have old Apple ][ disks laying around:

Many years ago I graduated and lost access to Apple ][ machines at school, but still had a bunch of floppy disks for them.

Then just a few years ago I happened to stumble across a tool called disk2fdi http://www.oldskool.org/disk2fdi for MS-DOS, that can read Apple disks using IBM hardware. I was able to use the trial version of that (from MS-DOS on an old IBM compatible) to recover images of my disks.

I transferred the images to a newer Linux machine, and was able to use dos33fsprogs https://github.com/deater/dos33fsprogs to extract individual files and confirm that the recovery was successful. I also tested some of the disk images in an Apple ][ emulator.

I also have a couple of old TRS-80 disks (possibly a version of CPM?) that I have not been able to recover, although I haven't really tried very hard either.

drivesavers advertisement

[gl4ss]

"The difficult part was CP/M and the file system itself and how it was written." that's a quote from the company doing the recovery.

that is, they're a professional company specializing in this kind of stuff and yet, for them the "file system" is claimed as the problem.

not the disc reading. but the data on the disc after reading.

Are you nuts ?

[e70838]

cpm is fully supported in Linux. (see http://linux.die.net/man/5/cpm). Even without cpm filesystem support, you just need to use dd to copy the disk, then launch an emulator for a cpm system. I have used turbo pascal on amstrad 6128 thanks to cpm. In linux world, reading a cpm disk is really a non issue.

hey kiddo

[Anonymous Coward]

you seem mesmerized by CP/M and the fact there were any OS at all before Windows or Linux. Go educate yourself before you post here, please.

And then reality happened....

[Anonymous Coward]

....Gene Rodenberry had a mystique for promoting.... Gene Roddenberry.

TOS was somewhat original, and that going for it. Plus a superior cast and crew. But only 2 of the 3 years were Roddenberry's.

Next Generation wasn't very good until Roddenberry was eased out of control of it. Anyone remember how crappy ST:TMP was? (And yeah, I like watching it once in awhile, but not because it's the best SciFi that was ever filmed...) Why was Wrath of Khan better? Uh, because Roddenberry was eased out of control of it.

I love old Star Trek, even Voyager and Enterprise. But honestly, none of it was because of Roddenberry. I liked Andromeda, but I feel that was probably much more because of Wolfe than Roddenberry.

The bottom line is that while I thank G.R. for bringing Trek to us, I don't expect his lost floppies have any particular gems of value in them.

Nope

[Ulric]

It said "We should go back in time and blow up Vulcan."