19 Mar
2007
19 Mar
'07
1:51 p.m.
Hi
I thought I'd add a little here. One thing that is missing. We'd need
some way to keep it running beyond when we are gone. There should
be a trust setup. It should have at least two or three people maintaining
is and willing to deal with the tax issues.
I don't know about that - we would have to see how it goes, but if enough
people are involved, individuals can come and go but the group continues.
The whole idea is to NOT make it dependant on any individual. I can
only see a problem arising if "everyone loses interest", in which case
we would have to revisit the thinking behind doing it in the first place...
I tend to agree that it shouldn't force format.
Dave's open format is
vary well thought out and his tool is good but there is legacy data
that would need to be converted. As an example, the disk image
data I have for the Polymorphic 8813 is in the format used by the
Polymorphic software to move disk images through modems to other
Polymorphic machines. It does currently lack a method to restore it
to a machine that has no boot floppy ( over time I hope to fix that ).
Other images are not even as floppy images. As an example, all the
data that I have for my Nicolet floppy disk system is images on
paper tape data ( in files on my PC ).
And of course, I also have cassette data images.
Some people like to store cassette images as audio files. I like to store
the actual data. I have done this for my Poly88 stuff and have a bootstrap
method to get things started without a first tape.
I also have images in a format that I'm just too lazy to convert. As an
example,
the images I made for my H89. These also have some legacy issues, as
my tool was used to create the images for the hard sectored images
on SEBHC. I've included a method to bootstrap without having a first
disk.
One concept that I really want to promote is that people involved in the
project can provide material to people who are unable to recreate the
medium themselves - in much the same way Don sent out physical
disks. Theres a lot of people who simply can't deal with how to get an
image back to physical media.
In line with this idea, I would hope that the key people would be fairly
well equiped to handle varous formats. With the equipment available,
we could (over time of course) convert existing data to the more general
formats (where appropriate) - this would not be mandated in any way,
but it would be a something that individuals can contribute that would
benefit the others.
Of course, there should always be some form of readme
with each
group of files explaining how to use the files. In the past, this has been
one of the hardest things to figure out on random archives. Many times,
I've seen images with no information on what to do with them. This
has happened because the directory was copied from someplace without
the support. Each directory should have at least a simple readme describing
how the images were made and what tool should be used to recover
them. Just a readme at the top directory is not enough. The top directory
may get separated. A readme is minimum.
These readme's may need updating as time goes by. Things like the fact
that some tool needs to run under a particular OS and not some future OS
that may be more common, needs to be passed on. It is hard to tell what bit
of information that is assumed today may be key for extracting useful
data in the future.
It must be a living archive.
Absolutely - part of the job will be to document the details. The creation,
collection, archival and documentation of appropriate tools is also key - this
is NOT a small job.
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html