On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 4:58 PM, Dave Mitton <dave at mitton.com> wrote:
FWIW: I have the following 8" Digital diskettes
labeled as follows:
1) RT Adventure, Tasks 8/7/79, It has a slip of paper with the printed
directory output
.
.
.
12) ZORK2,3 ??? (copy made on an original 1980 VMS
V2.0 RXO1 UPG kit!)
I'd be curious to see what's on #12.
If this is Infocom's Zork2 and Zork3 for the PDP-11 (which they could
be), I'm not expecting the game files themselves to be anything new
and unknown. There's an old project around that allows you to patch
any game file version to essentially any other, given a common game
file as a starting point. The early days are quite well represented
and the bugs analyzed in great detail.
What I'm curious about is the Z-machine on that (those?) disks (i.e.,
not for any of Bob's FORTRAN versions). I know there is now a modern
Z-machine for PDP-11, w/source, but I'm always curious about how the
did things "back in the day".
The back side of both have my Mill office
mailstop on them.
Evidently send via interoffice mail, likely from Supnik.
Interesting.
Does someone in the Boston area still have a working
8" diskette drive??
To assist indirectly, it's not necessary to have that 8" drive on a
PDP-11 to read RX01 disks. Someone with an 8" drive on a PC could
help image the contents, too (the only issue I could think of might be
with sector interleave). RX01s are "standard" IBM 37-mumble low-level
formatted. RX02s, though, are a different thing entirely. One easy
way to do that is a physical backup using a real RX02 or a clone (like
a Data Systems drive) on a UNIX or VMS machine that can take an RX211
or RXV21. I'm sure it's possible to do it on an RT-11 box, but I'm
not sure how I'd do that without looking it up first (disk copying is
easy; not as sure about disk imaging).
-ethan