[Elecraft] Old drives, old formats. Re: Pretty-printed manuals...[Thread Ended]

[Eric Swartz WA6HHQ - Elecraft]

Let's end this thread and its variants.

73,
Eric  WA6HHQ
List Moderator

www.elecraft.com
_..._



On Aug 21, 2011, at 4:40 PM, "Kevin Rock" <kevinr at coho.net> wrote:

> I have boxes of those 5 1/4 diskettes plus a few 8 inchers.  Everything I  
> wrote in the '70s and most of what I wrote in the '80s is now unavailable  
> to me.  Just the musty printouts give me a trail of provenance.  Some of  
> the algorithms I created back then would still be of value but I cannot  
> get to them.  An acoustic analysis program I wrote to simulate the noise  
> pollution around a surface phosphate mine would be nice to have.  It was  
> fun to write within the confines we had then but the transition to C and  
> Pascal made life much simpler.  Variables with actual descriptive names  
> were a boon to getting the work done faster and the debugging went more  
> quickly in the new modular forms.  To this day I am influenced by the  
> integer variables in Fortran: i, j, k.  Forth forced me to think in  
> functional decomposition.  I do not miss the confines of 65 kB but it was  
> nice to know the wiring of the entire computer and how each bit of the  
> rudimentary OSes of the day fit together.  Getting to the I/O lines was  
> much easier then too.  Now to dig out my CP/M box and see if it still  
> boots from those 8 inch floppies :)
>    73,
>       Kevin.  KD5ONS
> 
> 
> On Sun, 21 Aug 2011 14:19:26 -0700, Fred Jensen <k6dgw at foothill.net> wrote:
> 
>> Kind of mean-spirited, no?  I have a number of files and documents
>> stored on 5 1/4" 360 KB floppies [remember those], including my master's
>> thesis.  They were put there by me, mainly using an MS-DOS very early
>> forerunner to MS Office called "Enable" running on a 10 MHz AT&T desktop
>> built by Olivetti, with a green screen.   I don't know where I could
>> find a 5 1/4" drive now, I don't know where I can find a copy of that
>> version of Enable [it stored stuff in some form of compressed binary
>> because 4GB USB sticks hadn't been invented then [OK, USB hadn't been
>> invented either] and it had to work within what today we would consider
>> laughable storage limits, and I suspect at least some of the diskettes
>> are no longer readable.
>> 
>> Fortunately, I have printed copies of them, especially the thesis I
>> worked so hard on, and they are as readable as the day I printed them.
>> Does that make me a Luddite?
>> 
>> 73,
>> 
>> Fred K6DGW
>> Auburn CA
>> 
>> On 8/21/2011 7:42 AM, John Ragle wrote:
>> 
>>> Why is it that a supposedly
>>> technologically-adept hobby like ham radio contains such a larger than
>>> average Luddite constituency?
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