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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When Gene Roddenberry's computer died, it took with it the only method of accessing some 200 floppy disks of his unpublished work.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.
Unfortunately, we still don't know. The Roddenberry estate hasn't commented yet, and the data recovery agency is bound by a confidentiality agreement.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It said to never hire J J Abrams.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Fanfold printouts.
I'm a little sad that programmers these days don't even know what that is.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> 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!
This is slashdot. Stop lecturing us about what CP/M was.
And get off my lawn.
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.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
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.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
to Majel Barrett.
...ASCII porn. They think. It's really hard to tell.
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.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Mostly featuring green-skinned Orion slave girls, with the occasional Tellarite orgy thrown in.
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.
Unless she can manage to set lp0 on fire. Though this takes Elaine Roberts level hackery.
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)
I miss those days.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Yeah, but what kind? Thermal? Dot matrix? Daisy-wheel?
Oh wait, "line printer"? Holy shit, I just learned something new today.
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.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Indeed,
CP is center of pressure, and CM is center of mass, so CP/M is clearly the center of pressure divided by mass.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I was coding before they invented diapers.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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 ... ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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...
Ah, that reminded me of the smells and sounds of an old dot matrix printer. Mmmmmmmm.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
They better not copy those floppies.
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?
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Why aren't you submitting those stories instead of whining about them not being published, poindexter?
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.
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.
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.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I was coding before they invented assholes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Question is: will you still be coding when you're back in diapers?
Not in a cool startup that's for sure.
lucm, indeed.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
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.
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?
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.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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.
No sir I dont like it.
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!
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.
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.
They're still in use at some airports. The Epson printer may be a bit yellowed, but it's still screeching out passenger lists.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"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.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
<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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I invented coding.
Guy below me invented inventing, though.
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.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Funny thing - never thought the Okidata 830 chassis would live that damned long. But then, carbon copies aren't dead yet either. :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Funny thing - never thought the Okidata 830 chassis would live that damned long. But then, carbon copies aren't dead yet either. :)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
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. :-)
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
CP/M could work with different disk drives. I used double density 5.25" floppies.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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).
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.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Well... we got to the bottom of that one.
Thanks ;)
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
> Fanfold printouts.
Best thing in the world for tracing spaghetti code.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
OK, his reason is an assumption on his part - one that he has not bothered to verify.
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.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
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.
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.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
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?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
How many linefeeds does it take to advance an entire ream of fanfold paper through a printer? No more paper, no more logging.
"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.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
fire alarm control panels are still sometimes hooked up to dot matrix printers.
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
The program was self-documenting.
That explains it. She was using it until she finished paying for it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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.
I was coding when you were in my diapers
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
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.
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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.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
But you're a deuterostome. Before there was a brain to house a "you" in any shape or form, your body had an arsehole.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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,
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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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It said "We should go back in time and blow up Vulcan."
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 ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *