
The Joy of Dumping - benwr
http://www.nycresistor.com/2012/06/23/the-joy-of-dumping/
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chaseideas
Ahhh EPROMs, so much fun to be had with these lil guys. They're everywhere!

It really is a lot of fun to dump old chips and see what they contain. I have
a few devices here at the office that I like to update configs on just to
hyper-terminal in on and play around with once in a while. EEPROM's are a
similar sort of fun, but always feels just that much more nostalgically
"legacy."

I've got a USB based EPROM burner which makes easy work of the burning and
flashing.

Got my start with this type of thing when I used it to burn EPROM's for my
friends and modify their ECU's to accept EPROMS vs the factory read-only chips
that came in them.

We'd dump the original EPROM values, adjust things, burn it all back to an
EEPROM and pop it in the freshly added ZIF socket. Voila, new fuel/timing
maps. :)

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petercooper
This relates to something I've been feeling lately.. we're losing so much of
our digital culture.

I was reminiscing about the Web development scene in the mid to late 90s and
while I've found scraps (including Microsoft's first CSS demo showcase for IE
3) the majority of the pioneering work I remember from the time is either next
to impossible to find or flat out gone. And archive.org/Wayback Machine seems
to have almost given up keeping a deep history of the Web - its coverage seems
to get worse year by year.

The problem is, where do we store this stuff so it can live for decades to
come (because copying to our current machine will likely make it live on for
only a short while)? Or, perhaps the question is even.. should we bother?

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lionhearted
> This relates to something I've been feeling lately.. we're losing so much of
> our digital culture.

We're losing a huge percentage of what's being created, but the overall
percentage preserved is going up lightning-fast... it's weird as a historian
to try to go through history, _knowing_ it's incredibly incomplete. Landmark
global-defining events regarding the early Roman Republic, Mongolian Khanates,
etc, are _incredibly_ poorly documented, and scholarly works on the topic
contain tons of speculation and guesses about what happened to fill in the
blanks.

Like, really basic trivial stuff that wasn't recorded because the
price/benefit ratio wasn't worth doing when capture and transmission of
information was so expensive.

While we're losing a lot, the rate at which we _can_ and _do_ keep things is
growing tremendously... it'll be an interesting future, for sure. (Sorting
through all the mess, on the other hand, is going to become much trickier...)

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makmanalp
Same with old sub 1gb harddrives. I do a full dd_rescue before I toss them
away for good, lest they contain ancient history :)

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FreeFull
Nothing like connecting up one of your old HDDs and seeing what sort of data
you used to have that you now forgot about.

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makmanalp
Add floppies to the list too!

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eragnew
'incoherent, mumbling ghosts everywhere' -> great metaphor!

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ahefner
I do this too, albeit mostly as a precursor to erasing the EPROM and recycling
it for something else.

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beagle3
Am I mistaken or is the author one of the MakerBot founders?

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haldean
That's correct -- phooky is Adam Mayer's handle.

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cianclarke
We had an old EPROM programmer in college - was awesome.. And this isn't
ancient history, this was 2007 - we used it as part of our Comp Arch course!

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seclorum
Oh boy do I have some EEPROM's for this guy to dump .. old hardware never
dies: its users do!

(Yamaha A5000 sampler, I'm looking at you..)

