29 Apr
2014
29 Apr
'14
6:26 a.m.
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 16:11:29 -0700
From: Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com>
On 04/28/2014 02:56 PM, Thomas Dzubin wrote:
Chuck,
Can you give details on your "bit of cleaning" procedures for the
8-inch diskettes? I've got quite a few RX01/RX02 diskettes to "save"
(image) and recover data from a few for a friend.
Any tips on checking and/or cleaning the drives too, to avoid
physically damaging the diskettes, beyond what is in the DEC
Maintenance Manuals?
My basic plan is to get my PDP-8/A running with an RX01 and/or RX02
drive and use a serial port to send the data/image to a PC. Or can
anyone detail an easier way?
Thanks,
Bob
The American TV Show "60 minutes"
showed 8-inch floppies are still
being used by the military
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/60-minutes-shocked-to…
Good to see people still use 8-inch floppies.... or maybe not
Hardly surprising. I'll take an 8" floppy over a 3.5" one or 5.25"
one
any day. Provided that they weren't crap to start with, there's no
reason why they shouldn't continue to work for many years more. The
technology used to write and read them was extremely conservative. None
of that "shirt pocket" garbage.
I routinely get 8 inchers from the 1970s to retrieve data from and I
experience problems only rarely. I wish I could say the same about old
5.25" disks from the 80s and 3.5" disks from the 90s.
Back around 2000 (IIRC) I received a lot of very grimy RX-02 floppies
(at least they were RX02-style MFM) with a request to copy them to clean
media. All came through (after a bit of cleaning) just fine--they were
used on some sort of jig for the C130.
--Chuck