8 Aug
2003
8 Aug
'03
1:38 p.m.
----- Original Message -----
From: "hansp" <hansp(a)citem.org>
To: <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 1:15 PM
Subject: Re: Interesting Burroughs Photo Site
Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
Its the same for any generation of hardware. Even if you can find the
hardware the manuals were the first to get tossed/lost by the original owner
followed shortly after by all the software once it wasnt used for anything
anymore. Even if people keep juggling the software media to newer storage
unless you have the original documentation nobody will know what to do with
it in 30 years time. A computer without software is nothing but a
paperweight (or for newer machines a very expensive and inneficient hair
dryers)
Hi
It is best to save as much older media as
possible but one
also needs to be realistic. A room full of tapes can easily
be put onto a single disk drive of today. First level of importance
is to save the information.
I absolutely agree. We have a boatload of tapes reels, tape cassettes of
different descritptions, floppy disks of all sizes. But the most
important part, the data on those media is normally ignored. I hear the
comment "Why do we need ANOTHER box of floopies, we already have 20" -
makes my blood boil.... I really must get round to starting to read
those tapes.
After we retores our PDP-9, I strated looking amongst the 100 or so
DECtapes we had and found a pair that appeared, from their labels, to
contain a copy of DOS-15. Now DOS-15 was considered lost forever.
Anyways to cut a long story short, we managed to recover the data and
got DOS-15 opeartional again on the SIMH simulator. For more details
read Bo Supniks paper here :
http://simh.trailing-edge.com/docs/advmonsys.pdf
-- hbp