"A DiskVaccuum For Obsolete Disk Formats"

Several thoughts on this. First, there was a tragic lack of understanding of the historical value and recovery needs of floppy disks in the general public. It's old, old hat to people in the vintage computing communities, but these are relatively small groups. Other people would be inclined to leave floppies along the same way they'd leave old photographs, business cards, brochures and trinkets of a life lived, without realizing how much more fragile or unrecoverable they were in passing years. Unlike, say, this can of Mountain Dew which was under a lake for decades: http://imgur.com/gallery/5Ipbj Without that fundamental knowledge, there are only a limited number of people realizing they even want the material off these floppies, or that they have rare copies,or any of a number of the usual aspects of recognizing something needs restoring. Kryoflux, more specifically Christian, took a very territorial approach to the "market" of disk imaging, wanting to keep one foot in the hobby market, while also approaching the professional and academic markets. I've only met one other person more adversarial than Christian in decades of walking these halls. It doesn't lead to a feeling of camaraderie and shared innovation to be sure. That said, Kryoflux has been tireless in the advocating of why these devices are even needed, in terms and illustration that anyone can understand; I just also happen to think the attitude and combativeness (some of which has changed in recent times) poisoned a lot of opportunities. Phil and Diskferret have money problems and Phil is pretty defeatist about the whole endeavor - but he continues to innovate and his dream is strong. Unfortunately, like a lot of people, he has had to face down against Kryoflux instead of being the Avis to their Hertz (the Lidl to their Aldi, if you prefer) and he just doesn't have the resources necessary at this juncture to bring it to the next level. I hope that changes. The FC5025 is a nice general (and available) solution for many situations - it should be one of multiple choices that are as easy to use and work with as the rest. The creator is relatively quiet, and it takes effort to even find out who makes it besides "Device Side Data". (Adam Goldman). Adam is not exactly shaking up the podcast and newsletter worlds with a presence, which is his perogative. There are a number of other solutions out there as well, usually aimed very well towards one specific machine, either to use the original hardware to pull in the image or to blow out the image to a machine to make it run. None of them are particularly hot to go toe-to-toe with debates about what they "should" be doing - they just did what they did. I do think the tide is turning. I think the fundamental message (this old stuff is important, this old stuff needs to go through a converter to make it come alive again, it's possible to take a disk image and do something with it) is filtering down to where people aren't questioning its utility or possibility. We all know this is 10-20 years after it should have happened, but that's kind of how it is in general - historical archives being left to rot for many years before they're suddenly the most precious and worthwhile things in the world. I think that's just a problem of human nature, not of floppies or vintage software folks. I think we're going to have a few iterations of floppy reading, and the bottom-floor collapse of computing accessibility with items like the Raspberry Pi will lead to more people doing this work, and knowledge being shared. I also hope that places like the Internet Archive, Stanford, the Strong Museum, and many others will be known as repositories of software as previous places are known as repositories of art, artifacts and history. I think it's a reasonable hope. On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: