On Friday, 19 June 2015 11:15:43 UTC+1, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Charles Hope wrote:
In article ,
rick wrote:
On 14/06/2015 12:21, Jim White wrote:
In message
rick wrote:

I have a single 3.5" FD that was authored on a BBC compact.

It contains a few text files I would like to get off the disk .........
anybody have one of these pieces of history that still work?

Try asking (nicely) in comp.sys.acorn.misc



I'll do that

I have a RISC PC and the floppy drive still works. Just tried.

It was interesting others saying the floppies may have deteriorated. I
tried some of my very first ones with dates from the early 90s and they
all still worked.

Old cassettes still work ok, even the earliest ones, where ok is as good as they ever did. The pads can deteriorate, the tape is still ok for playback, but less so for recording.


NT

On 14/06/2015 13:43, Huge wrote:
On 2015-06-14, rick wrote:
I have a single 3.5" FD that was authored on a BBC compact.

It contains a few text files I would like to get off the disk .........
anybody have one of these pieces of history that still work?

If all else fails, have a word with the Computing Museum at Bletchley
Park. I gave them two ...





saw news today they are appealing for people to repair them ....

In article ,
rick wrote:
On 14/06/2015 13:43, Huge wrote:
On 2015-06-14, rick wrote:
I have a single 3.5" FD that was authored on a BBC compact.

It contains a few text files I would like to get off the disk .........
anybody have one of these pieces of history that still work?

If all else fails, have a word with the Computing Museum at Bletchley
Park. I gave them two ...





saw news today they are appealing for people to repair them ....

Well, quite. Apart from any dedicated chips, they require no specialist
techniques to repair.

--
*Oh, what a tangled website we weave when first we practice *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On Tuesday, 30 June 2015 15:09:12 UTC+1, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
rick wrote:
On 14/06/2015 13:43, Huge wrote:
On 2015-06-14, rick wrote:
I have a single 3.5" FD that was authored on a BBC compact.

It contains a few text files I would like to get off the disk .........
anybody have one of these pieces of history that still work?

If all else fails, have a word with the Computing Museum at Bletchley
Park. I gave them two ...





saw news today they are appealing for people to repair them ....

Well, quite. Apart from any dedicated chips, they require no specialist
techniques to repair.

What if you have a RAM problem, I remmeber they were more diffcult to pinpoint which chip was faulty

En el artículo ,
whisky-dave escribió:

What if you have a RAM problem, I remmeber they were more diffcult to pinpoint
which chip was faulty

You can disable alternative 16K halves of the RAM with a jumper which
made it easier to locate the bank in which the faulty chip sits. Also,
the 'back of a finger' technique is useful to find a chip running hooter
than the others - that is usually the suspect one.

RAM faults on the BBC B were pretty rare - the most common faults IME
were the 6522 VIA chips, often the one that provided the printer and
user ports, as the I/O lines from the user port were presented
unbuffered to the outside world and were prone to damage from people
plugging stuff in with the machine powered on.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

A follow up .... in conclusion.

Contrary to what some though the magnetic media was fine, one of our
erstwhile contributors took the disks from me - plugged them in and they
read fine .... I now have all the files.


So 3.5" diskettes are certainly good after not being used for 27 yrs !

Storage was simply being stuck in top draw in my study.

Thanks also to the other members who offered to help - I took up the
first responder :-)




On 14/06/2015 10:34, rick wrote:
I have a single 3.5" FD that was authored on a BBC compact.

It contains a few text files I would like to get off the disk .........
anybody have one of these pieces of history that still work?

On Friday, 3 July 2015 20:47:41 UTC+1, Mike Tomlinson wrote:
En el artículo ,
whisky-dave escribió:

What if you have a RAM problem, I remmeber they were more diffcult to pinpoint
which chip was faulty

You can disable alternative 16K halves of the RAM with a jumper which
made it easier to locate the bank in which the faulty chip sits. Also,
the 'back of a finger' technique is useful to find a chip running hooter
than the others - that is usually the suspect one.

RAM faults on the BBC B were pretty rare -

Not that rare I repaired quite a few, one of our studetns wrote a program to dump a dot on the screen for every memeory location that was working where there was a gap you could work out what chip was at fault. CS1 & CS2 come to mind. I even have a couple of service manuals somewhere as I went on the acorn servicing corse.

the most common faults IME
were the 6522 VIA chips, often the one that provided the printer and
user ports, as the I/O lines from the user port were presented
unbuffered to the outside world and were prone to damage from people
plugging stuff in with the machine powered on.

ours was the power supply and the RS423 chips.