On 9/21/2012 4:35 PM, Andrew Hoerter wrote:
Greetings,
I'm in possession of a reasonably complete set of SVR3 media (and
associated drivers, diagnostics, etc.) for the AT&T 3B2 on 5.25" QD
floppies. Sadly, I no longer have any 3B2 hardware, but with luck one
day I may change that.
I had planned on imaging and preserving these disks for my own use, if
nothing else. But it occurs to me that I don't know how rare they
might be, and I might do harm by attempting to read them in an EBay'ed
PC floppy drive (albeit with cleaned heads).
Is this material sufficiently preserved that I don't need to worry
about damaging my copies? I didn't see any 3B2 related bits on
bitsavers and a cursory google search didn't turn up much.
I have a few disks with duplicate contents, so I risked a test run
with Unix dd and got a sane-looking complete image with no I/O errors,
and no material shedding off the floppy that I could see. I still
need to see if the bits are good at a higher level (I think they are
formatted as "S5" filesystems, not sure). But I'd have no problem
shipping the floppies to a respected member of the community who does
this kind of thing all the time (e.g. bitsavers), if it would be worth
their time.
thanks,
-Andy
They are out there.
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/computers/software/3b2/
has the tape dumps which are actually just images of the floppies after
a point. There are a few other places too I can't remember. Last time I
had a 3B2 it was fairly easy to find software but, that was a couple
years ago. I have all the 3.0, 3.1, and 3.2 disk images downloaded from
somewhere else as well. Can't remember where. 4.1 is the one that seems
to be lost to history. I had it back in the 90's but, as far as I know
all the copies floating around the net are the same partial tar archive
and not actually usable for anything.