On 16 Oct 2005 11:29:18 GMT, (Huge) wrote:

I can read any of those formats with a couple of phone calls

Crumbs, that's impressive. I'd have thought you needed some kind of
hardware. )

It's all in the whistling 8-)

How about 3" floppies?

Hamster disks are still quite easy. The funny little Japanese palmtop
(can't remember who made it) was harder, but I think you could still
get them done. The drives had a standard interface, DOS filesystems
didn't vary much between platforms.

40 column?

Never seen one. Only 80 and 36.

paper tapes,

5 track?

I can do _those_ in my own shed! Teleprinters 7, 15 and 17 will go on
forever.

Well ... we have 43Tb online right now. Moving it about isn't "trivial".

I could move 43Tb more easily today than I could move a few Gb 10 years
ago.

Biggest I've personally worked on was 2.5Tb in a rack that you could
just about pick up on your own. As it happened, the live server for
that one burned down last week with probably 1/2Tb of data on it. The
master copy is still safe on the other side of town and in the first
time I've ever heard of a big disaster recovery plan actually _working_
right, the live workload was farmed out immediately to an outsourced
edge-server outfit who took up the slack instantly.


--
'Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu Evesham wagn'nagl fhtagn'

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 12:27:24 +0100, Anna Kettle
wrote:

In article ,
says...

I don't know "Conservation Resources" (I use the other big two)

Who are the other big two?

Probably more paper-based / museum conservation than the sort of
architectural conservation you deal with - Preservation Equipment and
Conservation by Design

In article ,
Andy Dingley wrote:
On 16 Oct 2005 11:29:18 GMT, (Huge) wrote:

I can read any of those formats with a couple of phone calls

Crumbs, that's impressive. I'd have thought you needed some kind of
hardware. )

It's all in the whistling 8-)

How about 3" floppies?

Hamster disks are still quite easy. The funny little Japanese palmtop
(can't remember who made it) was harder, but I think you could still
get them done. The drives had a standard interface, DOS filesystems
didn't vary much between platforms.

The 3" floppies I know used CP/M.

--
John Cartmell john@ followed by finnybank.com 0845 006 8822
Qercus magazine FAX +44 (0)8700-519-527 www.finnybank.com
Qercus - the best guide to RISC OS computing

In message , Huge
writes
raden writes:
In message , Huge
writes
raden writes:
In message ,
"dennis@home" writes

[16 lines snipped]

You didn't really pay attention there did you ?

As long as you have 'lektrik, all you need to do is plug it in and
switch it on, the standards, obsolete or not, are internal to the
computer and as long as the electronics still works will be quite
readable

So, here's an 8" floppy, get the data off it for me, will you?

I have to say that I've never seen a laptop with an 8" floppy in it


Selective snipping, dontchya lurve it ?

What's selective about "As long as you have 'lektrik, all you need to
do is plug it in". I can only conclude that you don't know what you're
talking about.

What else do you need to do with a laptop other than plug it in, switch
it on and wait for it to boot up?

.... assuming that nothing's failed in the meantime

--
geoff

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 16:34:04 +0100, John Cartmell
wrote:

The 3" floppies I know used CP/M.

Really? What were they on ? The only 3" I've seen were the Amstrad
wordprocessor and the odd Japanese palmtop. I don't even recall a CP/M
system with 3 1/2" disks.

The Einstein also had 3" drives, but that was some guy who'd bought a
warehouse full of bankrupt stock trying to add disks to them to make
them sell better. I have a feeling this was actually the same guy who
later started Time computers?

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 18:19:35 +0100,it is alleged that Andy Dingley
spake thusly in uk.d-i-y:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 16:34:04 +0100, John Cartmell
wrote:

The 3" floppies I know used CP/M.

Really? What were they on ? The only 3" I've seen were the Amstrad
wordprocessor and the odd Japanese palmtop. I don't even recall a CP/M
system with 3 1/2" disks.

The Einstein also had 3" drives, but that was some guy who'd bought a
warehouse full of bankrupt stock trying to add disks to them to make
them sell better. I have a feeling this was actually the same guy who
later started Time computers?


Amstrad CPC 6128s and so forth had CP/M on 3 inch amsoft floppies.

Many conflicting formats on those, zx spectrum +3 dos, cp/m,
proprietory word processor formats etc.

Was it just me or were those drives so hideously unreliable it wasn't
worth bothering?

--
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson, President of DEC, 1977

Andy Dingley wrote:
On 16 Oct 2005 00:17:09 GMT, (Huge) wrote:

So, here's an 8" floppy, get the data off it for me, will you?

Or a TK50.

Or a DC6150.

I can read any of those formats with a couple of phone calls (also
cards, paper tapes, anything 9 track)

Anything later, and especially DAT from the early '90s, and you're
screwed.
snip
Data evaporates from any medium that isn't actively spinning right this
minute. If you want to keep it, you need to put it onto a NAS now and
keep it on-line. As technology moves onwards, buy new hardware and copy
it over about every 5 years. Fortunately Moore's Law means that anything
it costs serious money to collect in the first place will be cheap to
move for the first time and trivial after that.

It depends.
For example, about 10 years ago, I moved all my floppy collection onto
CD, about 3 of them. (2 copies)
I'm at the moment archiving some old CDs onto DVD at the moment, the
floppy disks went onto one DVD.

On line is not needed - as long as readers remain available, and you run
thourough data integrity tests every so often.

Arthur wrote:
snip
long after the crows have picked our bones clean.
have scientists speculated on how long it would be before avery man made
thing has ..in short, turned to dust?

It depends.
The apollo landers will be easily visible for millions of years.
Many structures, such as mines in rock, infilled with debris, will be
visible until the rocks they are in are destroyed.

So, billions of years.
Nuclear waste dumps will have anomolous isotope readings until then too.

Andy Dingley wrote:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 16:34:04 +0100, John Cartmell
wrote:


The 3" floppies I know used CP/M.


Really? What were they on ? The only 3" I've seen were the Amstrad
wordprocessor and the odd Japanese palmtop. I don't even recall a CP/M
system with 3 1/2" disks.

The 8256 and 8512 both had CP/M 3 (i.e. banked memory environment)
supplied - you could boot that or boot directly into the supplied
loco-script.

For a (could be when it felt like it) CP/M system that used 3 1/2" disks
I suppose you could count the Commodore 128 and 128D when equiped with a
1581 external 3.5" drive.

The Einstein also had 3" drives, but that was some guy who'd bought a
warehouse full of bankrupt stock trying to add disks to them to make
them sell better. I have a feeling this was actually the same guy who
later started Time computers?

Time pre Granville technology I presume? (i.e. before they went tits up
the first time).

--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

In article ,
Andy Dingley wrote:
On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 16:34:04 +0100, John Cartmell
wrote:

The 3" floppies I know used CP/M.

Really? What were they on ? The only 3" I've seen were the Amstrad
wordprocessor and the odd Japanese palmtop. I don't even recall a CP/M
system with 3 1/2" disks.

Amstrad used CP/M for the CPC 646 and the PCW 8256 series. The 'wordprocessor'
had a vast arrange of software available for it including databases,
spreadsheets, dtp programs, graphics design, games, and numerous programming
applications because of the CP/M OS. LocoScript was the odd one out running
something rather odd on top of/beside the CP/M.



The Einstein also had 3" drives, but that was some guy who'd bought a
warehouse full of bankrupt stock trying to add disks to them to make
them sell better. I have a feeling this was actually the same guy who
later started Time computers?

--
John Cartmell john@ followed by finnybank.com 0845 006 8822
Qercus magazine FAX +44 (0)8700-519-527 www.finnybank.com
Qercus - the best guide to RISC OS computing

In article t,
Chip wrote:
On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 18:19:35 +0100,it is alleged that Andy Dingley
spake thusly in uk.d-i-y:

On Sun, 16 Oct 2005 16:34:04 +0100, John Cartmell
wrote:

The 3" floppies I know used CP/M.

Really? What were they on ? The only 3" I've seen were the Amstrad
wordprocessor and the odd Japanese palmtop. I don't even recall a CP/M
system with 3 1/2" disks.

The Einstein also had 3" drives, but that was some guy who'd bought a
warehouse full of bankrupt stock trying to add disks to them to make
them sell better. I have a feeling this was actually the same guy who
later started Time computers?


Amstrad CPC 6128s and so forth had CP/M on 3 inch amsoft floppies.

Many conflicting formats on those, zx spectrum +3 dos, cp/m,
proprietory word processor formats etc.

Was it just me or were those drives so hideously unreliable it wasn't
worth bothering?

Never had one fail! ;-)

I did add a 3.5" drive to my Amstrad PCW 8256+ because of the cost of the 3"
discs.

--
John Cartmell john@ followed by finnybank.com 0845 006 8822
Qercus magazine FAX +44 (0)8700-519-527 www.finnybank.com
Qercus - the best guide to RISC OS computing

Ian Stirling wrote:

On line is not needed - as long as readers remain available, and you run
thourough data integrity tests every so often.

The last bit being key! Nearly got caught out myself like that a while
ago. One of the OnStream tape drives we were using started playing up at
an awkward time. My business partner was using his to do daily
incrementals on his development platform, during a spell working up to a
big delivery to a tight deadline. I said "no need to worry right now -
you can use mine, I can live without it for a couple of weeks". That is
when we found that my one was dead as well and OnStream had gone tits
up! Just as well I did not need to restore anything from backup at that
moment



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 16 Oct 2005 18:09:27 GMT, Ian Stirling
wrote:

and you run thourough data integrity tests every so often.

But you won't though ! If it's spinning, you have a much higher degree
of confidence in its reliability.

Andy Dingley wrote:
On 16 Oct 2005 18:09:27 GMT, Ian Stirling
wrote:

and you run thourough data integrity tests every so often.

But you won't though ! If it's spinning, you have a much higher degree

Actually, I have, twice put my entire stack of backup CD/DVDs (some 400)
through a verify process - every file that read correctly originally (there
were burn errors) still has the same MD5 sum.

of confidence in its reliability.

Spinning, RAID, with off-site backup.

Inadequate insulation on the power switch puts 240VAC on +5V line, Oh dear.
(one that I witnessed)
However, there are some ways of killing large quantities of CD/DVD.
Inadequate storage conditions, or various solvent spills nearby can rapidly
destroy the disks.

"Ian Stirling" wrote in message
...
Andy Dingley wrote:
On 16 Oct 2005 18:09:27 GMT, Ian Stirling
wrote:

and you run thourough data integrity tests every so often.

But you won't though ! If it's spinning, you have a much higher degree

Actually, I have, twice put my entire stack of backup CD/DVDs (some 400)
through a verify process - every file that read correctly originally
(there
were burn errors) still has the same MD5 sum.

Did you read the raw data to see if the media was growing errors?
If it was you can predict how long it will be before the error correction
fails and you lose the data.

dennis@home wrote:

"Ian Stirling" wrote in message
...
Andy Dingley wrote:
On 16 Oct 2005 18:09:27 GMT, Ian Stirling
wrote:

and you run thourough data integrity tests every so often.

But you won't though ! If it's spinning, you have a much higher degree

Actually, I have, twice put my entire stack of backup CD/DVDs (some 400)
through a verify process - every file that read correctly originally
(there
were burn errors) still has the same MD5 sum.

Did you read the raw data to see if the media was growing errors?
If it was you can predict how long it will be before the error correction
fails and you lose the data.


No.
However, I used the drive that isn't quite as good with bad disks for the
tests.
A lot of the more critical stuff is backed up twice, anyway.