I recently threw away a bunch of old CD-ROMS dating back to the mid-90’s through 2000-ish. They had picture files and video files downloaded from various newsgroups on them. I tossed them because none of the software on my computer was able to open about half the files. The video files, in particular, were problematic. The old jpeg files opened just fine, so I know the problem wasn’t that the discs themselves had deteriorated.
I had an old DOS program that merely displayed a fake C:\ drive. Most of the files were puns; the one that sticks out the most to me is VAMPIRE.BAT
Awhile back we had to find a motherboard that still had multiple ISA slots. It was tricky but not impossible. And the hardware that needed is probably still worth $1000s of dollars.
Yipes. Would something like this help?
I just find it surprising that nobody has a good 34-pin FDD to USB interface. Or at least 34-pin FDD to something else that is commonly connected with a USB interface. A couple years ago I needed to connect an ancient SCSI scanner (with the large-style SCSI interface) to my modern computer, and I was able to find an adapter without any problem.
Hey I just had a thought. maybe not exactly what the OP had in mind but . . .
What about the quipu? Beside the fact that it contains data and even error checking, we do not know how to read one let alone how to create one in the proper format.
Do I win?
ETA: Looks like CalMeacham may have beaten me IF he can verify that article.
We don’t, but they do:
Back when I was at Villanova, we had racks of astronomical data on paper tape sitting in the hall collecting dust, because there was no way to read them. Every so often, one of the students would come up with a way to try to recover them (when I was there, one of my classmates was trying to run them through a scanner and figure out the holes from the scanned images), but since we were all undergrads, whoever was trying would end up graduating when the project was half done. Eventually, I think it all ended up just being thrown out.
Dick Shoup, one of the great computer graphics pioneers (he wrote SuperPaint and built the first video capture board) has the problem of trying to recover obsolete data. His page says:
*If you can help get the Nova 800 going, or can somehow read the Diablo-31-style 8-sector disk packs written by a Decision controller, please contact me. *
ISA slots, of course. :smack: That’s what I was originally thinking of when I was thinking of the 5.25" floppy drive connector on the motherboard. They do look a little bit alike.
No they don’t. Quipus contain a lot more than just the numeric data and “reading” one by simply reading the numbers is like reading a JPG by looking at the string on 0s and 1s without knowing how they encode into a picture.
Seems to me they are reading more than 0s and 1s. Whatever.
That’s not a bad idea. There seems to be a cottage industry out there that is scanning piano rolls and converting them to midi files.
And I had the good fortune once to meet Wayne Stahnke, who spearheaded a project to convert some piano rolls recorded by Rachmaninoff and others into digital data suitable for controlling a modern piano (I think he first did that pre-midi, and had to devise an interface himself). Just think that some of those old rolls were recorded by the artists themselves so when you hear a modern reproduction, you are re-hearing exactly what they played – not an acoustic recording like a record, but a faithful reproduction of their hand actions. That’s pretty amazing!
Thank you for this. I own some of Rachmaninoff’s piano rolls . . . and nothing to play them on.
To the OP: it depends how far back you want to go. I still have some rolls of punched paper tape of very complex typography output that I created back in the late '70s. I wonder whether there’s any way to read them today . . . not merely to read them, but to actually decipher the codes and recreate the output they represent.
Do not despair. A Window in Time and more.
As an interesting technical side note, Wayne Stahnke had to compensate for the roll’s speed changed as it wound/unwound from the spools (not capstan driven). The scanning was a bigger task than you might think.
The file format of the word processor that shipped with the early Macintoshes, MacWrite, is for all practical purposes extinct. Wikipedia Link
File Type: WORD
Creator Code: MACA
MacWrite was a program that was not 32 bit clean and therefore stopped working as of System 7 unless it was run on 24 bit mode (therefore limiting the OS to 8 total MB of RAM). It won’t run in “Classic mode” or even in emulators unless you go all the way back to vMac, a Mac Plus emulator.
For awhile other word processors (Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, MacWrite II, etc) could import/convert MacWrite files, but that pretty much died off by the end of the System 7 era. The popular format conversion program MacLink Plus stopped supporting MacWrite as a file format and Claris MacWrite Pro, which shipped with “XTND Translators” built in that could convert lots of common Mac and PC file formats, didn’t support original MacWrite either. On the PC side, early utilities for cross-platform conversion recognized MacWrite files but later ones did not. In modern MacOS X, MacWrite files, which have no file extension, are thought to be some kind of Unix executable. (In other words, no clue).
Since an entire early generation of Macintosh users filled many floppy disks with term papers and more complicated things written in MacWrite format, and it’s such a headache to deal with them now, I think it’s a perfect example.
I had a great word processor with my first 486. I think it was called WinWord. It used .WPD files. I loved this word processor because it had all the necessary features but not the ~2000 functions Microsoft Word offers. Also, it was wicked fast even on a 486 with 4mb (yes mb) of RAM.
Modern versions of MS Word can extract text from the WPD files but pulls out a lot of ASCII junk along the way. WPD is dead. Long live WPD.
In my experience, WPD was always a WordPerfect Document, which if that’s what you were saving Winword files in, was never the native format. [del]I’m almost certain[/del] Since at least as early as 1989, Word’s native file format has been DOC, albeit not the same DOC then that it is now, per my earlier post.
I think it was called WinWorks, maybe by SoftKey. I don’t know if it’s related to WordPerfect’s format. Wikipedia suggests that WordPerfect adopted .wpd later, using “.wp, .wp7, .wp6, .wp5, .wp4, and originally, no extension at all” earlier in the run. The reference they supply doesn’t seem to say that, though.
For the uninitiated, “Winword” is the name of the .exe file that runs Word for Windows, now just called Microsoft Word but still winword.exe.
The native word processing format for the (slightly) related Microsoft Works word processor was, at least way back when, WPS.
Cite: actual data files I have dating back to 1989.
When I was using WordPerfect (ca. 1992 as a user, 1995-98 as tech support), it was common for WP users to use the extension to identify the type of file they were creating (MEM for memo, LET for letter, etc.) or for professional secretaries to use it to identify who the work was for (KTK for KneadToKnow, etc.).
I use .bat every week.
Didn’t read everything, but I grew up on WordStar WS_(insert version here).