Build a Cheap Media-Reading PC? 255
tsm_sf writes "A recent Slashdot article got me thinking about dead and dying media. I'd like to build a cheap PC with the goal of being able to read as many old formats as possible. Size and power consumption would be design considerations; priority of media formats would be primary. How would you approach such a project?"
existing pc (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:USB adapters (Score:3, Insightful)
Get real. Do you think there are USB adapters for all those old tapedrives? Zipdrives? Floppy formats?
Re:Wrong end of the stick (Score:5, Insightful)
It's getting old hardware that'll challenge you.
It requires extensive scouting for parts that actually work, and obtaining them.
And when you get it and make sense of data, you would want to transfer it somewhere: you will end-up leapfrogging it trough couple of systems each decade apart from other unless you can interface everything with your target system (either not option or you would miss some hardware).
Definitely say good-bye to single, power efficient machine and say hi to couple of hard to maintain dinosaurs.
cant resist (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:USB adapters (Score:3, Insightful)
Another good question... (Score:4, Insightful)
...is why do Ask Slashdot articles keep getting posted in other sections?
Re:Tape?? (Score:2, Insightful)
What about punch cards?
Scanners could be used for that...
Re:USB adapters (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at his ID number.
USB was probably around all his life.
See... (Score:5, Insightful)
A backup of my PC will only be about five million pages or so.
2 things...
1: Once you take out your operating system, applications, porn and downloaded music collection... How much real data do you actually have? I'd bet it'd fit on a handful of pages, particularly if you convert it to a standardised data format which might still be readable in 10,20 years.
2: An archive is not a backup. And a backup makes a poor archive. An archive is a copy of something you may want to read or access in 10 years, 100 years, 500 years. A backup is something you do to preserve your current working data set in case of failure.
HTH
Having said that. Even though paper has a proven n hundred year archival track record, I doubt it is a practical solution for digital data.
Re:Magic Wand (Score:4, Insightful)
We had such a thing at university, so that students and staff who had odd hardware could get data on to the network, and from there store it on something more common.
I'm assuming that around that time (when 3.5 inch floppies hadn't completely replaced 5.25) there were many proprietary formats in fairly common use. Amiga or Atari, perhaps.
Can't see why you'd want such a Frankenstein jobby one at home.
waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
He doesn't. If he was serious, he'd already know exactly what kinds of disc/tape/card/wax cylinders he wanted to read and Googled how to do it. The only reason the question was submitted was to make a provocative "Ask Slashdot" topic. Same as 90% of these, hardly a word in their backstory is true, and all the brain sweat and long detailed posts written to attempt to help the poster are wasted.
Re:USB adapters (Score:3, Insightful)
Great. So how do you propose I handle an MFM drive? Last I checked, you needed an MFM controller, not just the right kind of connector.
I think the question will most likely be what can be built to handle the most number of controller cards, and so forth. You will probably also need to dual, triple,or possibly quad-boot the PC, because some of the drivers are DOS, some are Windows 3, some are 95, some may be OS/2, etc. Now, I am sure someone is going to bring up the concept of virtual machines, so let me put a stop to that right here - for a virtual machine to talk to hardware on your existing machine, you must have the driver installed on the existing machine, and then the virtual software must allow the virtual OS to talk to the real hardware. Defeats the purpose.
I truthfully doubt that you are going to be able to find a one-machine solution. You will not have enough ISA and PCI slots, you will run out of IRQs and addresses, you will have hardware conflicting with each other, and software trying to access devices that it should not be accessing, possibly corrupting data. Just go out and pick up some old 286s and 386s (places are usually willing to just give these away), throw your controller cards in them, and just accept the fact that you are going to have to use multiple machines.
Re:Prepare for damaged media (Score:3, Insightful)
and 2 x 1 TB harddrives in mirror raid to protect against drive failure. How to backup that 1TB of data will be answered in a future installment of Ask Slashdot.
That's easy. Get another 1TB drive in an external enclosure. Copy everything from the tower to the external drive. If the data is particularly valuable to you, consider buying several and stashing in multiple locations.
Of course, 1TB may be massive overkill. Most of these storage mediums are only going to have a few hundreds of kilobytes to a few MB of data each. Likely you'll only have a few GB of data max when all is said and done so you'll easily be able to make lots of copies of it on multiple media formats to insure it'll be safe.
Re:Get busy with eBay (Score:3, Insightful)
They were thinking that a lot of businesses had bought the machines, and weren't using the game ports for gaming, so they would welcome devices that put those ports to use. If you've ever seen pics of a C-64SX, the 23 pound 'portable' computer that was shown in the ads being carried by a guy in a gray suit getting off a learjet, you'll understand just what they thought was the market.
Except for one thing. If a businessman bought a PC, what were the odds it had a gameport to spare before the Pentium era? My memory is a little bit fuzzy about that time period regarding the game port since, well, mine came on a soundcard, which is exactly the sort of thing that would be omitted from a business machine until, well, about 1996 or so I'd guess.
I'm not sure when gameports became stock on PCs. I found it to be rather useless actually since any arcade game I could use the keyboard or a mouse. This is likely why I never noticed if a given motherboard had a gameport header when it became the norm to most the IO to the motherboard. I kind of noticed DA-15 cutouts on some cases, but this was not the norm.