
Reading disks from 1988 in 2018 - Doubleguitars
https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/01/reading-disks-from-1988-in-2018/
======
phs318u
For me the interesting part of this article was the author discovering that he
barely recognised his old self. I wonder how common this is? When I reflect on
myself, I have a notion that there's a kind of continuity to my ego over the
years that - despite the changes in the intervening years - I would recognise.
But I'm not a diary writer nor do I have a stack of old disks from a distant
part of my personal history, so I can't confirm either way.

Has anybody else experienced what this author describes?

~~~
interfixus
I have written quite a bit over the years. And some cartooning. I feel
amazingly in tune with my fourty years younger teenage self.

~~~
kodisha
Its easy to check, just go to gmail and rewind to first emails you ever sent.

~~~
zafka
Your comment makes me smile :) I was 49 when it was released from Beta.
Luckily i kept a journal for most of my twenties. I am making a concerted
effort to get back in the habit now. It is great fun to see what my concerns
and day to day events were 25 years ago.

~~~
interfixus
Welcome to my age range :)

Yes, Gmail is one of those recent things. _Google_ is one of those recent
things.

Though that is not my reason for using neither.

------
zellyn
Let me leave a plug here for the rare hacker news commentator that has Apple
II nostalgia, C++ skills, and Linux or Windows GUI knowledge.

After having tons of fun getting my Go Apple II emulator basically working, I
realized my efforts would be better spent improving an existing emulator than
bringing mine up to parity, and switched my efforts over to working on
OpenEmulator.

It has a portable emulation library at its core, and a relatively thin layer
of Mac OS GUI to show the windows, etc.

If someone with the right skills helped to create GUI layers for Windows
and/or Linux, I believe it would become much more popular, and start
attracting more development to add functionality, peripherals, etc. It already
has some of the best disk emulation, and almost certainly the most accurate
CRT emulation of any Apple II emulator.

If you'd like to try it out, try 4am's build:
[https://archive.org/details/OpenEmulatorSnapshots](https://archive.org/details/OpenEmulatorSnapshots)

~~~
CJefferson
What does it offer over MAME (which merged in MESS), the grand-daddy of multi
machine emulators?

~~~
zellyn
Areas where OpenEmulator is better: GPU-shader CRT emulation that looks almost
just like a real CRT (I have real monochrome and color CRTs for my Apple IIe,
and did a _lot_ of comparisons while implementing double hires support for
OpenEmulator). Also, better disk emulation that (because of a quirk of how it
works) can handle some copy-protect schemes better.

Areas where MAME is better: cross-platform, and you can set breakpoints and
debug etc. More devices. Probably more positives, but I'm not super familiar
with it. I mostly used it to compare bugs while working on
[https://github.com/zellyn/a2audit](https://github.com/zellyn/a2audit) :-)

------
userbinator
As a contrast in backwards-compatibility, PC floppies from 1988 (MS-DOS, FAT
format) would be immediately usable in a newish PC, just connect a suitable
floppy drive.

~~~
nottorp
For some definition of 'newish' \- motherboards have stopped including a
floppy controller years ago. There's nowhere to plug it in.

You'd have to get a USB floppy before everyone stops manufacturing them.

~~~
jzwinck
The Intel DQ67OW motherboard has a floppy connector and an LGA1155 socket for
Sandy Bridge (maybe Ivy Bridge too).

3.5 GHz Core i7 with a floppy drive is not too shabby.

It also has both PS/2 and serial ports if you would like to plug in a mouse.

~~~
nottorp
Yeah, I think that's the last generation when they included 3.5" floppy
controllers. I'm on an Ivy Bridge mobo and there's no floppy.

5.25" controllers were gone a long time before that though.

------
th0ma5
I recently did a deep dive into all the 5.25" disks I could find around. I do
sort of remember some of the stuff I found, but some of it was rather foreign.

I now have a handful of "flippy" disks and have to set up an old 1541 drive to
read these.

I was surprised how much of it was readable, the amount of dust and bad smell
these things developed over the 25 years in a basement, but also that I only
had about 200 megs of data at the end of the multi-day process.

I also spent some time digitizing Super 8 film too, so it has been a nostalgia
trip.

~~~
pasta
Some time ago I listened to my old casette tapes. I was amazed by the 'CD'
quality some still had.

Tape is more durable than I thought.

Also: most floppy disks have dust cleaners. So they are not affected by dusk
that much.

Also remember drilling holes in the disk for more storage? ;)

------
zandorg
About 5 years ago, I got a 1541 drive and an XA1541 plugged in the parallel
port. The purpose was to 'rip' some disks (last used in 1997) I found in my
mother's loft.

Most notably, I found an old story I thought was lost, and a trove of insane
Boulderdash caves/levels I wrote with a friend - in the Boulderdash level
editor - in about 1993.

I'm amazed that the disks survived. But finding the lost story - and some
letters from high school - was great.

Find instructions here:

[http://decompiler.org/doc_c64_disks.htm](http://decompiler.org/doc_c64_disks.htm)

------
cavDXF
He would've been better off buying a Kryoflux board.
[https://kryoflux.com/](https://kryoflux.com/)

He used an emulator anyway, why not using a faster and easier method, that
even has error correction?

------
linker3000
I had a slightly easier task when I found some of my old 3.5" PC floppies, and
I recovered some old ASM and Turbo Pascal work.

The best part was rediscovering the ASM code for a PC program that wrote out
the current time in words - I was inspired by a similar program by the late
Jim Button
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Knopf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Knopf)),
and I remember that at the time I had some fun working how to shave the code
down, saving a few bytes here and there by using different coding or
optimising the storage of the text data.

There's also a map editor for the PC game 'Rockford', although, sadly, it
doesn't work with the only version of the game I've found still available,
which seems to be a 'gen 2' clone using a different PC game engine and a
different map format.

Anyway, I put my nostalgia here:

[https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-
AS...](https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-ASM-)

------
lisper
I had a similar adventure about ten years ago. That story is here:

[http://blog.rongarret.info/2008/06/bugged-
life.html](http://blog.rongarret.info/2008/06/bugged-life.html)

------
eltoozero
Also the USB FC5025[0] controller, which unlike kryoflux reads floppies* like
floppies and does not create multi-hundred-megabyte flux-transition maps
requiring post-translation but instead gives you a bit level disk image, for
many common disk formats.

Also the Device-Side page is very HTML 1.0 and should appeal to HN peeps.

*5.25” floppies.

[0]:
[http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html](http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html)

------
zellyn
If you're interested in reading old Apple II disks, track down John Morris'
recent AppleSauce work. It's fantastic. He's @DiskBlitz on twitter, and gave a
talk at the last KansasFest about AppleSauce:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMrOiYCEuxc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMrOiYCEuxc)

------
fencepost
What I want to know is how I can get all my old term papers off these floppies
I used in the DEC Rainbow PCs in the computer center.

~~~
gumby
They can probably be read by any CP/M or DOS system (depending on which mode
you used it in). Though this article says "don't bother."

~~~
fencepost
It was actually meant as a joke, the Rainbow used odd disks (SSQD) and a
somewhat unique drive. I'm sure extracting the data would be possible but
likely much more awkward than in the posted article.

------
forinti
Acornsoft sold their games in 5.25" floppies inside some very nice black
plastic covers. I found that floppies that had been stored inside these covers
had survived, while those that were in the typical paper or cardboard sleeves
had not. This was about 10 years ago, when they were about 25 years old.

------
BrandoElFollito
Such articles show how useful cloud solutions for storage can be : the data is
disconnected from the underlying hardware.

When hardware progress occurs, files are transferred to new hardware and you
could expect that 30 years from now, your files will still be there.

~~~
makapuf
Well the ide interface has been there for quite a long time.

~~~
BrandoElFollito
Yes, but disk drives (readers) are harder and harder to get.

I have 5.25" floppy disks with some awesome software I wrote at the university
which is now probably lost (even if I had a drive the content is probably
gone). Same for 3.5"s, zips,...

~~~
zellyn
Unless you left them near something magnetic at some point, allowed them to
mildew, or left them in a _very_ hot car, they're quite possibly still
readable. They are remarkably stable over time. See all of 4am's work for
examples :-)

------
vidanay
Interestingly, I still have the monitor from my IIc. I no longer have the
computer, but the monitor is sitting in my garage. Sadly though I think it has
water damage.

~~~
drudru11
Do you still want the monitor?

~~~
vidanay
I have no need for it, but I would be VERY surprised if it is functional

~~~
drudru11
Are you in the SF Bay Area?

~~~
vidanay
No, Chicago

~~~
drudru11
Ah - make sure it goes to a good home

------
6d6b73
Just yesterday I acquired 3 5440 ibm disk cartridges.. I have no clue how/if
I'm ever going to be able to read them, but some day I will try:)

~~~
zellyn
Contact Jason Scott at the internet archive and he'll put you in touch with
someone.

------
rcarmo
I have a pile of similar stuff, including Zip disks (I still have an IDE drive
for that, but nowhere to plug it in). Need to clear those out some day...

~~~
nmg
That might be a herculean task - Iomega zip & jaz disks suffered from
notoriously poor data integrity/longevity, and I'm pretty sure device drivers
do not exist for any version of Windows newer than XP.

~~~
rcarmo
I intend to hook that up to a USB adapter and try it on a Linux box. I'll post
a writeup if I get it working.

