Date   : Thu, 10 Nov 2005 15:02:12 +0000
From   : Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk@...>
Subject: Re: Newsnight aired 2005/11/08

Jonathan Graham Harston wrote:
>>Message-ID: <005601c5e4cf$e43021d0$3201a8c0@...>
> 
>  
> "David Hunt" <dm.hunt@...> wrote:
> 
>>"Digital history locked into dead computers..."
> 
>  
> Hmmm. No, locked into dead media.
>  
> 
>>Notably, a man called Syd Hislam wrote his autobiography on an 80s machine
> 
>  
> Did I hear correctly that he'd written it on a C64? Serves him
> right ;)
>  
> 
>>Anyone heard of an 8.5" floppy!?! One of the presenters held up the disc by
> 
>  
> Eight **and and half** inch? Sloppy research there.
>  
> Floppies are 8", 5.25", 3.5", 3", 2". 

And 3.25", 4" and 12" :-) (never seen them myself - just know they 
existed very briefly in the evolution of disks)

>>Perhaps old format data retrieval would be a useful income stream to a
>>computer museum or a group of enthusiastic collectors...
> 
> I can do data transfer between 3", 3.5" and 5.25" disks, 40 or 80
> track, FM or MFM encoded, up to High Density (1600K-ish per disk).

Soft sector or hard sector too?

For *duplication* we should be able to handle 8" (HS or SS), 5.25" (HS 
or SS), 3.5" and 3" in any flavour of geometry and FM or MFM recording 
as we'll have operational machines which use these formats. Also M2FM 
(as used by Intel), and various GCR formats (Commodore, Apple, ACT etc.)

For grabbing data onto modern media the situation's a little more tricky 
  and depends on the format - although we should have hardware in a few 
weeks that can cope with pretty much any format there too and get raw 
data onto a modern system.

A little further down the line is hardware that can cope much better 
with reading damaged media - that one's currently in the design phase, 
but it's something we're going to need to worry about ourselves 
(nevermind offering it as a service!) as original disks deteriorate.

I'll ignore all the various flavours of hard drive, optical media, 
magtape, paper tape and drum stores or this would turn into a huge email ;-)

cheers

Jules