Greetings,
Amidst all the floppy archiving discussion, here's a slightly different
question:
The weather is warmer now where I live, so it's starting to be a good time
to do messy work outdoors. I have some mouldy floppy diskettes that I'd
like to try to read (mostly 5.25"), plus a good flux reader. What is the
best way to attempt to image these floppies?
My thinking right now is that for each floppy I can attempt this procedure:
- remove the mouldy cookie from the infected disk jacket; discard the latter
- give the cookie the best clean I can (how?) and allow to dry
- place the cookie in a clean disk jacket
- attempt to image
- clean floppy drive heads
Does this seem like a sensible plan? If so, what would be the best way to
clean as much mould off the cookie as I can? Tools that come to mind are
distilled water (tap water here is full of chalk), dish soap,
cyclomethicone, and of course more fearsome solvents. I have kimwipes,
microfibre cloths, and... 200-grit sandpaper, I guess :-)
Thanks for any advice,
--Tom
Recently i digged out a system called Rexon 30, which was sold in
germany/europe as a CMC 7030.
The OS called RECAP BB was stored on a combined hard/removeable disk
drive. There is no floppy or tapedrive at all.
BB stands for a version of Business-Basic.
The removeable pack got lost but there is a little hope that the OS
is still on the fixed disc.
There will be a lot of work for me before i can try to power up this
system again. Maybe it never will.
If anyone has information and/or software stored for this system,
i would be glad if he/she can part it with me.
Rolf
--
Interestingly, i'm looking at procuring a reasonably vintage laptop for
a computer festival i'm planning to attend soon. It seems that many
laptops of the PIII era use SuperIO chips, but i'm rather confused as to
how "low level" they get.
Some of you may remember my RCA MS2000. I've had great luck writing
bootable images from a PIII machine with a "standard" 1.44mb floppy
drive, despite the format being 70-track, SSDD. The machine's floppy
controller uses a bona-fide NEC uPD765 though, so no surprises it worked
fine... ( Here's a video of me playing around with it for the curious...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdKkaf-77dE )
I'm really asking if anyone has any recommendations for a laptop that is
reasonably powerful, fairly modern (has USB), but also has a
direct-connection floppy drive that can do device level shenanigans (via
Omniflop) to allow me to write floppies in obscure formats. Bonus points
if it can use it with a serial terminal emulator, and run the Emma02 RCA
1802 emulator on it as well. I, like Tony, don't drive, so i need
something compact and portable for public transport travel.
I've been eyeing up a Dell Latitude C series (C600?) But the whole
SuperIO-over-parallel thing makes me think there might be proprietary
drivers involved, preventing device level access of the floppy drives...
Hopefully some of you might be a bit more wise.
Cheers, Josh
Hi all, we are getting overstocked on the 1000 series stuff and wanted
to see if anyone needed anything. We have most everything you could have
in the 1000 A-series hardware. If anyone needs any loaded up A990 boxes
we have a bunch of them configured below for $1,400.00
A990 Server 14-slot Micro 1000 Server
1 x 12990x A990 CPU
1 x 12221B 8MB Memory
1 x C2247A 1GB SE SCSI Internal disk drive
1 x C150xx DDS DAT Internal Tape Drive
1 x 12016A SCSI Controller board
1 x 12009A HP-IB Interface board
1 x 12005A Serial Interface board
1 x 12006A Parallel interface board
1 x 12040A Asynchronous Multiplexer Interface (MUX) board
1 x 02430x Voltage Jumper Board
1 x 12230A Front-plane memory connector (CPU to memory connector)
Feel free to email if you need any HP 1000 hardware.
Thanks
Jesse Dougherty
Cypress Technology Inc
jesse(a)cypress-tech.com
At the most recent CoCoFEST!, I brought home the old Glenside Club
Computer Hard Drive. The mechanism is an ST-251, and I was wondering if
someone on-list would be willing to attempt to pull data off the drive.
I have no ability to configure to read this drive type, and the data is
not precious or anything, I just though we should try to pull it off for
historical sake. I was not in the club when teh drive was in use, so I
do not know what could be on it. I assume BBS data, but it could be
anything.
Happy to post to someone who wants to give it a go. If the drive needs
to be destroyed to get the data, or if attempting to read the data
destroys the drive, I will not hold anyone responsible. I don't even
need the drive back, just data if it is recoverable.
Jim
--
Jim Brain
brain(a)jbrain.com
www.jbrain.com
>Message: 6
>Date: Sat, 20 May 2023 07:25:39 -0700
>From: Chuck Guzis <cclist(a)sydex.com>
>Subject: [cctalk] Re: Getting floppy images to/from real floppy disks.
>
>On 5/20/23 04:21, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
>
>> I was startled to discover my (long gone) Athlon XP box could only
>> handle a single floppy drive. The BIOS has no option for a 2nd.
>>
>> I can't imagine that was a significant cost saving.
>
>It's a matter of pins. I believe that it started when the "SuperIO"
>chip started packing in more support for various peripheral functions
>and the 2 pins for drive select and motor control of an extra drive were
>viewed as least important. Earlier versions of the chip often allowed
>re-purposing the pins used for the parallel port as an interface for an
>extra floppy--you saw this on laptop systems, which often had only one
>floppy drive in any case. cf. Intel's PCISet chip sets.
>
>--Chuck
My main computer is a 15-year old Dell Precision T3400 (Core 2 Duo). It can handle multiple floppy drives, but the BIOS does not allow 360KB 5.25" disks, only 1.2MB in that size.
Bob
VCF will be having another Swap Meet this coming June 10 from 8AM to 2PM
for the general public and 7AM for vendors.
Signup here to reserve a spot.
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeLdDjGN1TtOjPxNq38VA43p36oW5HXuX0…>
Same place as the previous swap meets in the big parking lot on Monmouth
Boulevard in Wall, NJ
<https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B011'05.5%22N+74%C2%B003'47.9%22W/@40.1848619,-74.0643212,350m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m13!1m6!3m5!1s0x89c228394afc24b3:0x793045909b6e8fba!2sInfoAge+Science+and+History+Museums!8m2!3d40.1857343!4d-74.0593097!3m5!1s0x0:0xbe14db9783fe1872!7e2!8m2!3d40.18486!4d-74.0633081>
.
A change for this year is that we will have some food being sold by the
South Monmouth Fire Museum. This will be a fundraiser for them and a
welcome service for our attendees.
All the information that you need is here: https://vcfed.org/vcf-swap-meet/
Take care,
Jeff Brace
VCF National Board Member Chairman & Vice President
Vintage Computer Festival East Showrunner
VCF Mid-Atlantic Event Manager
Vintage Computer Federation is a 501c3 charity
https://vcfed.org/ <http://www.vcfed.org/>
I have just acquired a number of PDP-8 paper tapes. My reader/punch is
not working at the moment (neither is my PDP-8 but that's another story).
I am looking to beg, borrow or buy a paper tape reader or reader/punch
(stand alone or PC04) so that I can archive these tapes as they are
getting more and more rare.
I would prefer a serial (RS-232) reader or reader/punch but I could deal
with a parallel and create my own parallel to serial converter or get
some kind of USB to parallel adapter.
There are several "hand pull" types of readers out there (like the
OP-80A) but I am afraid of damaging the very old fanfold paper tape by
using my inconsistent hand rather than some kind of motor driven
mechanism which is designed for smooth paper tape flow.
Does anyone have any ideas or something they have to sell or donate?
Please contact me by email directly.
Note: This is also being posted to the VCF DEC Forum.
Thank you,
Mike Katz
bitwiz@12bitsbe
>Message: 23
>Date: Thu, 18 May 2023 17:32:00 +0100
>From: Tony Duell <ard.p850ug1(a)gmail.com>
>Subject: [cctalk]
>
<snip>
<But that's a minor issue. The loss of RS232 communications is a lot
<more serious.
<
<-tony
Can you fix it using MODE.com from a DOS prompt?
Bob
