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Hardware IT Technology

Retro Machines Key to Rescuing Old Data 245

Posted by Hemos from the or-just-some-really-good-emulation dept.
SimilarityEngine writes "New Scientist report on the virtues of old kit. From the article: 'Today's stylish PCs may perform billions of calculations a second and store tens of billions of bytes of data, but for many, they have got nothing on the 32, 48 or 64-kilobyte machines that were the giants of the early 1980s. This renewed interest in old-school computing is more than just a trip down memory-chip lane. Early computers are a part of our technological heritage, and also offer a unique perspective on how today's machines work. And within growing collections of original computers and home-made replicas, and the anecdote-filled web pages and blogs devoted to them, lies the equipment and expertise that will one day help unlock our past by reading countless computer files stored in outmoded formats.'"
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Retro Machines Key to Rescuing Old Data More

Retro Machines Key to Rescuing Old Data

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  • First Post? (Score:4, Funny)

    by nearlygod ( 641860 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @06:57AM (#12861845) Homepage
    My friend John Titor told me that the IBM 5100 is going to be very popular soon.

  • Data? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lachlan76 ( 770870 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:00AM (#12861860)
    Which storage media would last this long? What's the point of using old computers to get your data if the media is dead?

    • Re:Data? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jay Maynard ( 54798 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:16AM (#12861947) Homepage
      I regularly read 9-track tapes written in the late 60s.

      The tapes I have the most problems with are actually from about 1984-1987 or so...Memorex and BASF switched to a binder (the stuff that keeps the oxide on the tape) in those years that tends to migrate to the surface, making the tape stick to the read/write head and preventing it from reading correctly. There are ways of correcting the problem long enough to read the data, but I haven't been able to try any of them (the best, supposedly, is to run the tape through the same process used to freeze-dry food commercially).
      • There's a whole cottage industry of people who bake out old audio tapes to recover them. I had a guy do this with my old 1/4" two track tapes a couple years ago. It apparently varies quite a bit among tape types. Almost all 1/4" tapes made until pretty recently suffer from sticky shed, but most cassettes don't, except for a category of them that were made from surplus studio tape that was sliced up into narrower strips and loaded into cassettes.
      • I regularly read 9-track tapes written in the late 60s.

        While you may not be able to "say out loud" what the data is, can you go into the type of machine (hardware / OS / etc.) that it is you use to read data that old? I'm just rather curious of how you do what you do.


        Thanx!

      • Laboratory-scale lyophilizers are not all that expensive, and would probably be adequate (if you really do just want to freeze-dry them).

        There are two steps to freeze-drying:

        1. Freeze
        2. Dry

        Step 1 is accomplished by putting the object in a pile of dry ice (ok, there are faster ways, but this will work for tapes).

        Step 2 is accomplished by putting the object in a vacuum. The vacuum should be equiped with a cold trap to capture water vapor. Not much to this - a plumbing trap made of glass in a dry-ice-a
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Data? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Andrewkov ( 140579 )
        Modern day floppy disks (both 5.25" and 3.5") are greatly inferior to the disks from the 80's and 90's, in my experience.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • are greatly inferior to the disks from the 80's and 90's
          I have to agree with you on this.


          I started my "computing" life in the early 80's on a C=64 (and an Apple ][). Even when I "double-sided" floppys, they were still quite readable when I fired up on of my C=64's a couple years ago. I've never had that kind of luck with floppys from these days. In the rare ocassion I need to use ONE floppy now-a-days, I usually grab 10 or so since they rarely even format anymore no matter what FS I use (FAT, ext2,
      • Yup, had a student come back to challenge some college prep grades (athlete...go figure). His records were on the floppy floppies, I was able to assemble an old POS machine and read them. Didn't help - he still failed.

  • old cruft (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spectrokid ( 660550 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:00AM (#12861864) Homepage
    Funny that archeology in the future will be totally different. Instead of trying to maximise information out of a 2500 BC chicken bone, the art will be how to distill meaning out of gazillions of backup tapes... But true, I already spent half a day once trying to load my own thesis....

    • Re:old cruft (Score:2, Funny)

      by Daxx_61 ( 828017 )
      Though most researchers will end up on stuff like the Sega Saturn, doing 'research'.
    • I doubt that future archeologists could learn anything more interesting than what they could learn from all our print, audio and video media. An old employee database versus the latest batman movie ?, no chance.

      • Re:old cruft (Score:5, Interesting)

        by theonetruekeebler ( 60888 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:54AM (#12862216) Homepage Journal
        I doubt that future archeologists could learn anything more interesting than what they could learn from all our print, audio and video media

        Until they get to the patient records archives at the CDC or even a local hospital's TB clinic. Then they can learn a whole hell of a lot about how a disease used to spread and its epidemiological characteristics in a society that doesn't have "modern" medicine to control it.

        I worked for Georgia's Division of Public Health in the 1990s. One of the most interesting projects I worked on was to recover data from the Medical College of Georgia's TB clinic. It was all on 9-track tape and was recorded from 1966 to 1973. The doctor who wrote the software was in his late 70s when I met him. He still understood the data encoding that he created for his clinic's dinosaur computer system and was working independently to import it all into a PC-based database. The concept of relational data was practically alien for minicomputers of the era; the way he had to encode the clinic's data to build statistical models out of it was fascinating, but it would have been lost forever if the original coder weren't still alive.

  • Commodore... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by doppleganger871 ( 303020 )
    Seems to be a growing interest in the Commodore community. On irc.eskimo.com #c64friends channel, there's a bunch of people developing software and hardware for the C64 and 128. There's one guy even working entirely in the CP/M mode of the 128. Since I had to pack my 128 system up to move, I haven't done anything with it lately, but after the new computer room is setup in the house, I'll be back in full swing. 16MHz 65c02 processor, 16MB RAM, 2GB HDD... it's not your father's Commodore.

  • BS. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis AT gmail DOT com> on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:04AM (#12861885) Homepage
    You don't need a Vic-20 to read an audio cassette tape... you just need something that can capture the audio stream, some sort of analogue signal converter capable of producing a binary digit stream. Something like an "analogue-to-digital" converter if such said device exists all our problems are saved! ... /sarcasm

    Yes, retro computing is cool. No, it's not required to read ancient recording formats.

    Tom

    • Re:BS. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mabinogi ( 74033 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:34AM (#12862068) Homepage
      The point is that the interest in reto computing is keeping the _knowledge_ required to convert the stream of data to something useful.
      Things like old manuals and spec sheets that might tell you exactly what encoding is used in the data. (Since manuals actually contained real information in those days, rather than being purely a vehicle for "Screw you, don't blame us" EULAs and disclaimers)
    • I'm with you. On the hardware side, most of this stuff is easily reproducable. That's why it was done that way in the first place. A counter-example would be a friggin' Apple variable speed disk drive. Yikes.

      As for file formats, virtually everything I encountered in my CP/M experiences could be figured out by a perl programmer in about 5 minutes.

      Keeping this stuff around for reading history is silly. Keeping it around because it IS history makes more sense. I have a Kaypro-10 in my closet, and I don

    • Re:BS. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Knx ( 743893 )
      I tend to disagree for several reasons.

      1) It's probably going to be actually hard to find any tape recorder in the next coming years, just like it's not quite easy to find a Vic-20 today.

      2) Many programs were (are) protected, using very specific properties of the original hardware used at the time. That's mostly true for floppies, for instance. (Just try to read a protected 3"1/2 Atari ST or Amiga floppy on today's PC floppy drives -- if your PC still has one -- and you'll see what I mean). But even som
    • You can't do a good job with a standard cassette player. Believe me, I've tried. Too much noise and distortion of the signal makes it unusable. Using original hardware, however, gives a clear and near-perfect signal, even after a decade.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • First off, how much data is actually on tapes [that home computers used] that is worth saving that hasn't already moved to a hard disk or cdrom?

        I mean even during the BBS boom you could fill an entire shareware collection [omitting dupes and things that JUST PLAIN SUCK] onto a single DVD with enough room to have a 15 minute music video.

        So let's burn the data to media and make copies to be sent around the world.

        Tom

  • Absolutely true. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TransEurope ( 889206 ) <eniac.uni-koblenz@de> on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:04AM (#12861888)
    If you really want to programm in assembler and want to learn how computers work, buy an old C64 and the the Data Becker C64 Bible, or an old Amiga at Ebay. If you want to to the same on a modern iP4-machine, you'll give up faster than a SETI@home-package is analyzied ;)
    • I am an old C64 user but I would suggest that you go for an Old ColorComputer or a CP/M machine if you want to learn Assembler. The 6502 was not as nice of a chip to program in assembly as the 6809 or Z80 was.
      Of course another good option would be to pick up one of the Pic, AVR, 68hc11, z8 or 8051 based development system. Then you can have all sorts of fun.

  • Catweasel! (Score:5, Informative)

    by mkro ( 644055 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:06AM (#12861898)
    The Catweasel [jschoenfeld.de] is a PCI floppy controller (among other things), and boasts support for over 1100 disk formats. I plan to start backing up my old Amiga and C64 disks with this one "any day now".

  • Data Legacy (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:07AM (#12861901)
    I just gave a speech to a bunch of progressive groups in Kentucky Saturday that included a screed on data loss. Twenty two years after starting a lawsuit on fair taxation and coal reserves, for example, the suit finally made it through the courts. My question was: how good a job are we doing preserving the records and data for those cases that take 30 or 50 years, like tobacco or asbestos. I'm looking ahead to the lawsuits on global warming.

    If you want to see the talk:
    http://www.hollowground.net/tecactv [hollowground.net]

    wh
    • My question was: how good a job are we doing preserving the records and data for those cases that take 30 or 50 years, like tobacco or asbestos. I'm looking ahead to the lawsuits on global warming.

      Uh, why would a coal company want to preserve records on how they might have caused global warming? It would serve no business purpose except to guarantee the demise of the company in the event that LA ends up underwater. In the event that global warming turns out to be a farse the company gains nothing for pr

  • Rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)

    by onion2k ( 203094 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:07AM (#12861903) Homepage
    There's certainly good reason to keep old data readers about the place.. I once spent a very dull weekend with a cassette->parallel interface loading some old ZX Spectrum code onto a pc and encoding the files into .z80 format. But there's no good reason at all to keep the rest of the hardware around. Every system before about 1995 has been emulated on faster, more stable modern system that afford us things like memory save points, video output recording, and other pleasentries.

    Old hardware is dead.
    • Or do what I did - re-program all your old games in DHTML [webeisteddfod.com] - runs on todays hardware, at yesterdays speeds

    • Re:Rubbish (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      Nope.

      I have a few bits of old hardware around - a Spectrum, a C64, a Mac Plus, an Astro Blaster [handheldmuseum.com] handheld, an STe with mono monitor...a few bits. Nothing that uncommon, except perhaps the Astro Blaster.

      There is something about using the old hardware which is not present when running an emulator. Take the C64 as the best example of this. Emulated you don't get the true sound of the SID (each one was different...), you get pixellated graphics if trying to play at a decent size on a monitor (versus just pl

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:23AM (#12862001)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Think about it if you released any program to the public domain after it has no chance of making the owner any earnings you will destroy the GPL?
        There is little chance of a GPL program making the author money so it then becomes public domain? Which means that someone can take the code modify it and make it a closed source product.
        What needs to happen is for companies to release the programs as public domain or at least free. How about it EA???

    • Re:Rubbish (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AltairMan ( 530839 )
      The need to keep around the old hardware depends on your goals. If you're into historical preservation, then you of course would keep, restore, and maintain an old machine. If you just want to move the data and programs and exit the platform, then donate the hardware to someone who wants to use it.

      I've written an emulator program that emulates an Altair 8800. Functional? Yes. Does it run old programs? Yes. Fun to use? I think so, if you like ASCII character-based games. Is it the same to operate as the r
    • My first computer I owned was a Timex/Sinclair 1000/ZX-81. The TS1000 had such a weird keyboard layout (membrane keypad that made working in BASIC easier by letting you press a function key followed by a regular key to enter a whole keyword with just those 2 presses), that the TS1000 emulators I've seen are very difficult to work with. Your standard PC keyboard isn't going to be properly labeled for all those alternate functions of the standard keys.

      Emulators are typically evolving works in progress too.

  • Retro Links (Score:4, Informative)

    by hedgehog2097 ( 688249 ) * on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:09AM (#12861911)

    I'm surprised the article didn't link to old-computers.com:
    http://www.old-computers.com/news/default.asp [old-computers.com]

    Plenty of "Replica"-esque machines on mini-itx. The best two are probably
    http://mini-itx.com/projects/bbcitxb/ [mini-itx.com]
    http://mini-itx.com/projects/sx64/ [mini-itx.com]

  • Testify (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PakProtector ( 115173 ) <cevkiv@@@gmail...com> on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:10AM (#12861913) Journal

    When I was working at the local Humane Society, I saved a Apple Mac II/ci from the dumpster. It had been donated to the thrift store and was thrown away because it was 'too old' to interest anyone.

    I like playing certain old games, mainly because if a game is done right, it doesn't matter how outdated the graphics get -- Classics never change.

    There's just something you get out of playing the Zork Trilogy on the old hardware that you don't get on the new stuff.

  • Don't throw out those old tapes! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jay Maynard ( 54798 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:10AM (#12861918) Homepage
    You'd be amazed at what we've got running under Hercules [conmicro.cx]...there's a lot of computing history being lost because people threw away old round tapes, thinking "Oh, we'll never run THAT again". A guy used an emulator to rescue old census data from Africa (was the story reported here? It wasn't that long ago), and that kind of thing will be only seen more as time goes on.

    If you know of old IBM mainframe software on tape, drop me a note; chances are I can recover it. I've got 9-track and 3480 cartridge tape drives on a PC just for that purpose.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:12AM (#12861929)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The only practical solution for "permanent" data storage currently are huge RAID hard disk arrays where you can replace a drive as it goes faulty.

      Who says RAID has to be done with hard drives?

      Yes, you need to have a regular system of rearchival, but a DVD-based or tape-based system could work just as well and give you just as much redundancy.
    • CD are not as durable as many think. Check this article for some wake up.

      http://www.rense.com/general52/themythofthe100year .htm [rense.com]

      From the article:

      "But an investigation by a Dutch personal computer magazine, PC Active, has shown that some CD-Rs are unreadable in as little as two years, because the dyes in the CD's recording layer fade."

    • Re:Media Degradation Is The Issue (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pla ( 258480 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @12:16PM (#12864587) Journal
      The problem, once you've got the data off, is how you store it on a media that won't degrade over time.

      Simple - Redundant serial copies. Unlike analog, digital copies don't lose anything from generation to generation.

      I use DVDs for backups, but don't actually "trust" them to work, only as a last-resort fallback. I keep my old files by keeping them on live systems.

      My first HDD held 10MB. My second held 40MB - So I just copied the entire contents of the first over. My next drive held 340MB, again, just copied the entire 40 to it, complete with the final state of the 10MB drive. Then a 1.2GB, same process again.

      Now my home file server holds over half a TB (though I'll soon need to add a bit more space to it). I had started to worry about not having a good complete backup of that (I have 90% of it backed to DVD, but like I said, I'd rather not need to actually depend on that)... Until I recently upgraded my SO's desktop machine. Poof, threw in a 400GB drive, she needs about 20GB, and has a complete mirror of all my files up to March of this year.

      I see no reason for that trend not to continue... The original media (the floppies from which I loaded files onto the 10MB drive) have long since vanished, and even the fifth generation of the above sequence (the 1.2GB drive) has vanished into the landfill. Yet I still have all the files I would need to run a vintage XT clone with MS-DOS 3.3, neatly filed away with no fewer than three redundant copies still in existance.


      So I see the problem of how to store something "forever" as a bit of a red herring - We don't need any particular medium that lasts forever, only to last a few years and then we can make another new copy of it.

  • Universal Format (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ThosLives ( 686517 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:16AM (#12861950) Journal
    Interesting quote from the summary: "countless computer files stored in outmoded formats" led me to an interesting train of thought I've been mulling around for a while, somewhat affected by me recent reading of G.E.B.

    The universal format for documentation, I believe, is the printed hard-copy document. Think of it this way: If we received the Rosetta Stone, or bits of the Torah or Quran, on some electronic media, would we have been able to get the content off - especially if it was encrypted somehow?

    I think the only universal format is the printed page, which requires no "special equipment" to read (it might not be interpretable, but it can easily be recognised as a document) whereas a computer-recorded pile of numbers, while perhaps recognisable has having meaningful content, will probably, in the future, have no context in which to extract its meaning. Consider this: you receive some piece of hardware in the future which you realise stores binary data. Is it numbers? Is it a program? Is it sample data from atmospheric noise collection? All you know is there is binary data. All you know is there is binary data, and you don't even know if it is stored in 8-bit blocks, 16-bit blocks, 3 bit-blocks, or whatever. You don't know if it's in ASCII or some weird encoding of, say, Farsi. You might try running some statistical analysis on it to see if it's some kind of language, but against what do you compare the 'glyphs' of the numbers? When you see a stone like the rosetta stone, it's obvious what you've got; when you've got a list of numbers, there is no way to tell what it is other than a list of numbers.

    This is a great danger of the digital age, in my opinion, and it is good that there is still expertise floating around about the "old" equipment. But remember, the "old" equipment is still less than a century old: what will happen in 100 more years? 400? I have this nagging concern that data integrity of digital media will not last the thousands of years that printed material lasted for future generations. I think this is why I really don't like the idea of digitising the libraries, or even digitising photography.

    Definitely something to consider for all those folks concerned with "the best data format" and if .DOC or .PDF or XML or whatever is better.

    The best format is one that contains enough information to clue the interpreters how to interpret it rather than relying on something else. Right now, all digital documents are merely a string of numbers, and a string of numbers is not sufficient to contain meaning to interpret itself - those numbers rely on some interpreter to receive meaning (as an excersise to prove this, take any file on your computer and look at it in a debugger - on various systems, a hex-editor, and a program that will use the contents of any file as raw image or audio data. It might not be rendered sensibly (I don't know that I'd want to listen to the "song" that, say, Firefox would be), but there is no effective way to tell if the string of numbers has meaning by using trial and error.

    A printed document unequivocally has more information than this - a schemaatic diagram is different than a picture of an apple is different than a poem... and while we may not know 'apple' or the language of the poem or have the capability to understand the diagram, we know that those things aren't, say, a random paint splatter.

    So, again, while I applaud the efforts of these guys for writing down their knowledge, if they don't do it in a "universal" format, who will be around to interpret their blogs and digital records in 1000 years?

    • Re:Universal Format (Score:3, Interesting)

      by 26199 ( 577806 )

      The logical conclusion of your argument seems to be that files should be stored as bitmaps. Even the most basic analysis of a bitmap file will reveal regularity with period equal to the width of the image... and it's natural to then look at the data with corresponding periods aligned, revealing the image. Then you have your piece of paper equivalent.

      There was an article in New Scientist (IIRC) a while back about constructing a signal which would be interpretable by aliens. They did, indeed, use a bitmap r

      • If you want to think about it further, all data we generate inside of a computer is a "bitmap". A certain number of "bits" will "map" to a certain object. Thus, your entire argument really doesn't make much sense, and still reveals the former problem, "how do you read something without knowing how to read it?". Your bitmaps could be interpreted in 16, 28, 64, 13, any number of different combinations of bits, and technically be just as correct any other logical implementation, even if it doesn't produce the

        • Er... the word bitmap has a specific meaning [wikipedia.org]. My assertion is that it's a way of representing an image that anyone will be able to interpret as an image, thus making it as good as a piece of paper with an image on it. That's all.

          • The problem is, you made an assertion, where another person doesn't make the same assertion.

            Certainly, raster bitmaps (as they are in images) can also be represented as vector bitmaps (as they are in text; think linear storage matrix), or as Fourier matricies, or as (...). While the human eye can look at such a pattern and quickly grep a certain meaning, another organism's eye may look at the same pattern and grep an entire different meaning.

            The quickest example I can think of is a colored bitmap. What c

      • Re:Universal Format (Score:3, Informative)

        by Council ( 514577 )
        Read this:

        http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/034 5 315367/qid=1119278072/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl 14/002-9620787-0418454?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 [amazon.com]

        It's an account of how they put together the data stored on the plate on Voyager, which aside from the plaque everyone knows, contained a gold record with bitmap-encoded pictures documenting the earth. The book goes over each picture and the rationale behind choosing it. It is absolutely fascinating; they thought very hard about how t
    • Of course I only speak for myself, but I couldn't care less if my data is readable 1000 years from now. I'm much more concerned with 20-80 years down the line.

    • 1000 years huh. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 )
      Your problem is not one alone; it's a very common problem. How do you read anything without the direct knowledge of the language?

      The answer is a common translator table, which you hinted to in your own post. If not for the Rosetta stone, we would have no translation for heiroglyphs, and that written language would be entirely lost to us.

      It really wouldn't matter if you left something written in english emblazed on a wall, in stone, or on an old floppy disk inside of an old floppy drive. A person in 10
        • Godel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Google for it or check your favourite bookstore. It's impossible to describe in a few words but let me try: the author attempts to answer the question "what is a self?" by describing what the music of J.S. Bach, the art of M.C. Escher and the mathematics of K. Godel have in common, particularly the problems and paradoxes that arise from the concept of indirect self-reference in formal systems.

          It's a marvellous and stimulating read, litter
    • Sounds like you'd better start carving the x86 instruction set onto stone tablets!

    • Re:Universal Format (Score:3, Interesting)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 )
      paper only lasts at most about 300 years, those thousand year old "books" you hear about are printed on animal parts (skin & other tissue). Unless you're prepared to do the National Archives thing and store them in helium filled cases with UV protection, your printouts are doomed. Storing a gigabyte on those archival quality ink and paper which claim to last 500 years would be bulky and very expensive...don't know about you, but my data isn't that important. Let the archeologists reconstruct our civi

    • Re:Universal Format (Score:2, Informative)

      by pruss ( 246395 )
      Writing isn't quite a universal format. Look at Linear A. :-)
    • While the parent poster does provide some valid
      arguments in favor of retaining data on hardcopy,
      the real problem is data overload -- how do you
      separate the "wheat from the chaff"?

      Either CD/DVD media is going to achieve new levels
      of longevity, or there is going to be one hell of
      a run on vellum!
      • While the parent poster does provide some valid arguments in favor of retaining data on hardcopy, the real problem is data overload -- how do you separate the "wheat from the chaff"?

        Clearly my job is the most important one in the world. I'm sure that 10,000 years from now arcaeologists will be clamoring over each other to read my code documentation for the functions I'm working on today, and as an added bonus they might even dig up a test script that verifies that it works correctly... :)

        If they're luck
    • I have this nagging concern that data integrity of digital media will not last the thousands of years that printed material lasted for future generations

      How many pieces of paper have actually lasted thousands of years? You're talking about a handful.

      The examples you used, like the Quran or the Torah were preserved only becaused thousands of copies existed back in their time, and they were generally handled with care, and as a result a few made it intact.

      Likewise, documents like the US or EU Constitutio
  • Old machines are good learning tools, even if only on paper, although they were easier to work upon in my electronics class.

    Hardware concepts haven't significantly changed over the years. What has changed, significantly, is that everything has become smaller. Once the basics are understood through learning of these old machines, the more complex concepts of more modern machines can be more easily understood. Good Computer Architecture classes will start off on the hardware of these old machines first, and build off those concepts as the class moves into understanding newer machines.
    • Agreed! I am slowly learning assembly language for the c64 from an old kids book i found for 50 cents. It actually MAKES SENSE now - It is often easier to understand things once you know its roots.

      I dont know how well that'll translate to win32 assembler, but I know learning the insides of the 6510 is heaps more fun than learning asp.net!
  • My family's old Atari 400 (w/the cool keyboard upgrade, of course!) has been stored out at my parents for years... I'll have to dig that out and clean it up for future emergencies.

    After all, where would the world be if we couldn't play Miner 2049'er down the road?
    • Do you still have your copy of De Re Atari handy, along with the assembler/editor cartridge? Programming the 6502 is a hoot.

      I crammed my 400 to 48KB (how strange it feels to type "KB"!) so I could get the floppy upgrade and play Jumpman. I sure hope the disk still exists, and survived the attic heat.

  • definition (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kc0re ( 739168 )
    What is the definition of a "retro" machine? My blog here [is-a-geek.net] is running on, what i consider to be, a retro machine. It's a 233 recently reformatted with Fedora Core 3. (Yes I know 4 is out)

    While many many not think this is very old, I guess it's basically because I can't find a way to hook up my Tandy 1000 to the internet, (or i'd have my blog on it.. that'd be funny)
    • I guess it's basically because I can't find a way to hook up my Tandy 1000 to the internet, (or i'd have my blog on it.. that'd be funny)

      Especially when you post links to it on Slashdot... *laughs evilly*

    • Re:definition (Score:3, Insightful)

      by imsabbel ( 611519 )
      A machine able to run OS still widely in use and running the same cpu architecture may be OLD, but certainly not "retro"...
    • hrm... how to hook a tandy 1000 to 'net:

      Parallel port would probably be the easiest way. If not that, serial port. If you can find an ISA ethernet card, more power to you.

      Then you need software: probably KA9Q or one of the proprietary stacks.

      In any event, I'd say this is a solved problem, you should check into the Tandy 1000 Yahoo group, or the usenet tandy group.

      And no, a P233 is not 'retro' by any stretch of the imagination. Heck, on the retro computing lists I'm on, a Tandy 1000 is not considered ret
  • That's why I keep my Commodore 64 with 1541 and 1571 disk drives.

    That way I can read someone's pirated Donkey Kong or Questron diskette.

    You never know when an opportunity like that to be of service to all of mankind will appear.
  • Surpulus AN/UYK-7 case, preferably with ferrite core memory modules and control panel, for admittedly perverse case-modding project.
    No real interest in programming the thing in CMS-2 [murdoch.edu.au], just want it for a conversation piece.

  • Buy a Model-T to learn about combustion (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @07:39AM (#12862107) Homepage Journal
    Better yet buy a DC-3 to learn about flight dynamics. Truth is, old is old. There are practical limits to what you can learn from it because what THEY knew about when they built it was limited or in some ways flawed outright.
    • Before you use such an incredibly ignorant anology, I'd like to point out that the Model T could run on cow paths and rutted, muddy roads that would stop a modern 4-wheel drive SUV dead in it's tracks. It was so simple to drive and maintain that an illiterate could operate it.

      It was over-engineered to survive and keep going despite the fact that was regularly abused and run on the most horrible roads almost 100% of the time.

      In many, MANY ways, it was more advanced than modern vehicles. And what is most sa

    • Re:Buy a Model-T to learn about combustion (Score:4, Insightful)

      by VAXcat ( 674775 ) on Monday June 20, 2005 @11:38AM (#12864250)
      Heh? You could learn far more about internal combustion engines using a Model-T rather than a modern car...in like wise, you would also learn far more about aviation with a DC-3 than a modern jet...In both cases, the engineering is much more accessable and the devices are much closer to the physics involved than their modern counterparts. On the DC-3, for example, you would learn a great deal more about adverse yaw and use of the rudder to deal with it than you would on a modern plane with sophisticated flight controls. Navigating using a sectional chart, dead reckoning, piotage amd VORs on the DC-3 will teach you much more about navigation than just punching a destination in on a GPS. The Model-T, with its simple carburetor and Kettering cycle ignition, all very exposed, will teach you far more about physics than attempting to work under the hood of a new car, with its fuel injection and computer controlled spark. In general, the first few generations of something are much more useful for learning than the products produced after many decades of engineering have overlaid the first principles.
  • I have a large bag of sinclair spectrum 48k/128k tapes that I occasionally trip over when I wander around the darker recesses of my office. Does anyone want 'them' for posterity. Some of them might even work! If people really wanted to keep hold of old data, they wouldn't have written it down on the media equivilant of the back of a used envelope, would they!
  • A few years back, I wanted to recover the Apple Pascal source code for SunDog: Frozen Legacy [brucefwebster.com] and so bought several Apple II systems on (of course) eBay. As boxes kept showing up, my wife asked me, "Exactly how many of these do you need?" Of course, I just wanted to be sure to have enough to put together a working, fully loaded (>= 4 disk drives, serial port, extended memory, hi-res color monitor, etc.) system. Which, ultimately, I did.

    Of course, having extracted all that I can extract, and facing a move

    • Once you've got your data, you don't necessarily have to hold on to your Apple IIs (I still have mine...).

      Apple Emulators are pretty good (just do a google).
      I actually run one regularly enough on my PDA (an Ipaq pocket PC), and can run Apple Adventure, Beagle Brothers software, 6502 Assembler, etc... There are also several available for running under Windows...

  • For anyone interested - my retro computing blog / forum:

    http://www.bytecellar.com [bytecellar.com]

    blakespot

    • I'll add that 8-bit portable computers are an increasingly popular way to get into retro computing. These machines won't take up so much space as to upset your wife, you can easily get them out and put them away, and you generally don't have a bunch of stuff connected (expansion device, disk controllers, monitors, wall cubes...)

      Model T (100/102/200), WP-2, Z88, NC100/200, etc.

      http://bitchin100.com/ [bitchin100.com]

  • Odd disk formats, etc. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JoeCommodore ( 567479 ) <larry@portcommodore.com> on Monday June 20, 2005 @08:53AM (#12862627) Homepage
    One of my side hobbies seems to be converting PET documents to text files or PET disk/tapes to emulator friendly images.

    Tapes are relatively easy as the 64 can read most of the, the hard part is that sone disk formats are hard to come by, the Commodore PET has several different format drives, the most popular are the 4040/2031 which a Commodore 64 can read, but the 512k single sided 8050 and double sided 8250/SFD-1001 disks are another matter both using quad density drives (nowhere related to the PC HD format) and GCR encoded to increase capacity. These drives (unless you are a hardware whiz) communicate exclusively using IEEE-488 so A PET/CBM or B128 are best employed.

    I myself use the PC-to-pet interface the C2N232 [funet.fi] with related software to get the files fron the PET to the PC, from there it's a matter of some home spun chipmunk BASIC programs to get the files tidyed up and in ASCII.

    To be consistently successful at it you have to not only have the tools but knowledge of the various disk and file formats and system quirks that you are dealing with, which will help you get around the unexpected.

    I've had requests to help convert 64 related software, but have passed on that as I am not into real time programming work (some sort of lighting program on a cartridge) but there are others up to that challenge.

    Same goes for other platforms like old 400k Mac disks which use a varialble speed drive and can only be read IIRC on a 68k mac using System 6 or lower. There are also the protected disks or those that were recorded with utilities to improve speed or capacity (which makes the disks/tapes differ from any knwn standard format). Not everything can be done with an emulator.

  • This is a topic that I wrote a few articles on a while back.

    Read Intro to Digital Archeology [baheyeldin.com] for an overview.

    More here [baheyeldin.com].

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