20 Mar
1998
20 Mar
'98
4:23 a.m.
"Richard A. Cini" <rcini(a)email.msn.com>
Here's my idea. Why can't we contact those
vendors that are still in
{corporate} existence and who at one time produced interesting and useful
hardware or software (examples would be MicroSolutions, or CentralPoint),
and try to purchase, for nominal $$$, the rights to produce and distribute
these goods in small quantities.
Because as soon as they think there's a buck to be made, the price
will become prohibitive. :-)
There's some hope for classic computers from the Catweasel people.
In their FAQ, they admit knowledge of eight-inch drives, and would
be willing to add support for them and their disk formats if someone
loaned them a drive and some disks. The problem? They're in Germany.
Andrew De Quincey <adq(a)tardis.ed.ac.uk> recently posted some messages
to various Usenet classic groups regarding a project where he's
capturing the bit-level signals from a drive, and using a Java
program to decode it to higher levels of representation.
I've been improving my ANSI C tools for getting directories and
bursting disk image files for UCSD Pascal and RT-11. Right now
they work on logical-order disk images, but I want to improve them to
read physical-sector-order images, as well as Anadisk's extra
eight-byte sector-header format. Sadly, Anadisk doesn't work under
a WinNT command shell, I have to boot back to DOS.
- John
Jefferson Computer Museum <http://www.threedee.com/jcm>