4 ms·

Some years ago, I went through a tedious process of moving all the data I had on my mid-80s Compaq Deskpro Portable to a slightly-less-antique IBM AT, using 5.2

Some years ago, I went through a tedious process of moving all the data I had on my mid-80s Compaq Deskpro Portable to a slightly-less-antique IBM AT, using 5.25 inch floppies. Then I migrated the data from my AT to a still-newer PC using 3.5 inch floppies. From there it was a simple matter of burning the data onto a CD to migrate to my then-current PC - which, in turn, I backed up and copied over to my now-current PC when I replaced it. The upshot is that I still have all the files I created a quarter of a century ago.

dmd 15y ago
Yep; same here. I'm 33 now, and I'm unreasonably proud to say that I still have essentially every file I ever created, going back to hundreds of Bank Street Writer and KoalaPaint files created on my Commodore 64 in the mid-1980s.
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  All I need is a Volkswriter emulator and I can re-read those senior public and early high school essays again. :)
- dstein 15y ago
  You're just ahead of your time. Fortunately, with the way computing seems to be heading, one day we all will be able to say we still have every file (document, image, etc) we ever created.
  - extension 15y ago
    Oh, I think it remains to be seen whether cloud computing will make the problem better or worse. If all of our data is eventually consolidated with a few very large companies who do a good job of preserving it and keeping it accessible to us, then that may be an improvement. But keep in mind that these companies are not in the archival business. Fresh data is a lot more valuable to them than old stuff. Yes, Google scans old books and whatnot but that's a tiny amount of data compared to everyone's digital junk heap that they accumulate over a lifetime. If I consider everything I've ever written on the internet to be my "files" then I've already lost a great deal of it just because I can't keep track of where it all is, let alone whether it's still online at all.
    - aw3c2 15y ago
      He might have meant the cheapness of storage and I sure hope he did. I could have kept incremental backups of all my digital creations in the last 20 years and it would not be 1 terabyte.
  - zokier 15y ago
    I don't know. Modern people also create a lot more files than back in the floppy days. Many files are created to be consumed over short period of time, and probably discarded when they become inconvenient.
sehugg 15y ago
I migrated my Apple ][ disks in the early 90's. There weren't any migration utilities available (or I just didn't know which BBS to call, maybe) so I had to write my own disk-reader-to-serial on the Apple side and the appropriate conversion routines on the PC side. Fun times.
- mmphosis 15y ago
  http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/ http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/
SwellJoe 15y ago
I did the same with my Amigas about 5 years ago, which was more complicated than your process (I had to make a cable and buy a USB-to-RS232 adapter since modern PCs don't have serial ports). A few of the floppies were unreadable, particularly the ones where I'd used one of the non-standard formats that packed more data onto the disk and performed faster, but I was mostly able to pull everything off, and the hard disks were fine. I have a directory on my Linux box of the old Amiga stuff, and can play the mods I wrote, and poke around at some of the stuff I wrote, including the first book I ever wrote (which was an interactive Jazz improvisation course in AmigaText), and such. Honestly, though, other than the music, I didn't find much worth keeping. Pirated games, 8-bit porn, etc. Though, it did remind me of the name of my favorite old synthesis tool (RGS), so I was able to look it up and do some research on modern alternatives...which it turns out there aren't really any, unfortunately. I'd carried on a conversation with the developer when he announced no further development, and wish I still had the notes, as he'd included quite a bit of technical details about the way it works (though it's mostly obvious now that I'm more knowledgeable; FFT over time for the generation of images, adding sine waves for the other direction). But, I've never gotten around to trying to reproduce it. Interestingly, those ancient machines (a 2000 and 3000, both with hard disk controllers and hard disks; an AD516 sound card; and some other formerly very expensive hardware), and a pile of random Amiga junk and magazines, sold for $300. Given that PC stuff from that era would bring nothing, I'd say the resale value of Amigas has held up shockingly well. Collector value, I suppose. Even weirder, I guess, I bought a Commodore 64 after getting rid of the Amigas.
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  Fun times. When I was in high school, a friend of mine ran a BBS from his Commodore 128.
- mortenjorck 15y ago
  I have probably hundreds of DeluxePaint animations from the mid-90s distributed across a handful of floppy disks and a couple of A1200 hard drives (from when I wanted to be a video game artist, of course!). I've wondered before how I might ever go about recovering them, if indeed they are recoverable. Any instructions you'd recommend?
dugmartin 15y ago
A couple of years ago I was moving and decided to do something with the shoeboxes full of 5.25" and 3.5" disks I had sitting in my attic. I couldn't bear just to pitch them so feeling nostalgic I resurrected an old PC (also in the attic) with a 3.5" drive and I was able to read about 50% of them including one that had my Programming Languages class assignments from 1990 (a Lisp REPL with macros written in Pascal and a pretty printer for Modula-2 code). The other disks I cared about where unreadable even after using the freezer trick on them. Where are they now? The working ones are in a shoebox in my attic in my new house. I'll probably check on them again in 10 years. btw, if you need a copy of Turbo Pascal 3.0 just let me know...
- klipt 15y ago
  You can get Turbo Pascal 5.5 off Embarcadero's (formerly Borland's) website: http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20803 http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20803 Of course, Free Pascal is a better modern alternative.

dmd 15y ago

Yep; same here. I'm 33 now, and I'm unreasonably proud to say that I still have essentially every file I ever created, going back to hundreds of Bank Street Writer and KoalaPaint files created on my Commodore 64 in the mid-1980s.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago
All I need is a Volkswriter emulator and I can re-read those senior public and early high school essays again. :)
dstein 15y ago
You're just ahead of your time. Fortunately, with the way computing seems to be heading, one day we all will be able to say we still have every file (document, image, etc) we ever created.
- extension 15y ago
  Oh, I think it remains to be seen whether cloud computing will make the problem better or worse. If all of our data is eventually consolidated with a few very large companies who do a good job of preserving it and keeping it accessible to us, then that may be an improvement. But keep in mind that these companies are not in the archival business. Fresh data is a lot more valuable to them than old stuff. Yes, Google scans old books and whatnot but that's a tiny amount of data compared to everyone's digital junk heap that they accumulate over a lifetime. If I consider everything I've ever written on the internet to be my "files" then I've already lost a great deal of it just because I can't keep track of where it all is, let alone whether it's still online at all.
  - aw3c2 15y ago
    He might have meant the cheapness of storage and I sure hope he did. I could have kept incremental backups of all my digital creations in the last 20 years and it would not be 1 terabyte.
- zokier 15y ago
  I don't know. Modern people also create a lot more files than back in the floppy days. Many files are created to be consumed over short period of time, and probably discarded when they become inconvenient.

sehugg 15y ago

I migrated my Apple ][ disks in the early 90's. There weren't any migration utilities available (or I just didn't know which BBS to call, maybe) so I had to write my own disk-reader-to-serial on the Apple side and the appropriate conversion routines on the PC side. Fun times.

mmphosis 15y ago
http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/ http://adtpro.sourceforge.net/

SwellJoe 15y ago

I did the same with my Amigas about 5 years ago, which was more complicated than your process (I had to make a cable and buy a USB-to-RS232 adapter since modern PCs don't have serial ports). A few of the floppies were unreadable, particularly the ones where I'd used one of the non-standard formats that packed more data onto the disk and performed faster, but I was mostly able to pull everything off, and the hard disks were fine. I have a directory on my Linux box of the old Amiga stuff, and can play the mods I wrote, and poke around at some of the stuff I wrote, including the first book I ever wrote (which was an interactive Jazz improvisation course in AmigaText), and such. Honestly, though, other than the music, I didn't find much worth keeping. Pirated games, 8-bit porn, etc. Though, it did remind me of the name of my favorite old synthesis tool (RGS), so I was able to look it up and do some research on modern alternatives...which it turns out there aren't really any, unfortunately. I'd carried on a conversation with the developer when he announced no further development, and wish I still had the notes, as he'd included quite a bit of technical details about the way it works (though it's mostly obvious now that I'm more knowledgeable; FFT over time for the generation of images, adding sine waves for the other direction). But, I've never gotten around to trying to reproduce it. Interestingly, those ancient machines (a 2000 and 3000, both with hard disk controllers and hard disks; an AD516 sound card; and some other formerly very expensive hardware), and a pile of random Amiga junk and magazines, sold for $300. Given that PC stuff from that era would bring nothing, I'd say the resale value of Amigas has held up shockingly well. Collector value, I suppose. Even weirder, I guess, I bought a Commodore 64 after getting rid of the Amigas.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago
Fun times. When I was in high school, a friend of mine ran a BBS from his Commodore 128.
mortenjorck 15y ago
I have probably hundreds of DeluxePaint animations from the mid-90s distributed across a handful of floppy disks and a couple of A1200 hard drives (from when I wanted to be a video game artist, of course!). I've wondered before how I might ever go about recovering them, if indeed they are recoverable. Any instructions you'd recommend?

dugmartin 15y ago

A couple of years ago I was moving and decided to do something with the shoeboxes full of 5.25" and 3.5" disks I had sitting in my attic. I couldn't bear just to pitch them so feeling nostalgic I resurrected an old PC (also in the attic) with a 3.5" drive and I was able to read about 50% of them including one that had my Programming Languages class assignments from 1990 (a Lisp REPL with macros written in Pascal and a pretty printer for Modula-2 code). The other disks I cared about where unreadable even after using the freezer trick on them. Where are they now? The working ones are in a shoebox in my attic in my new house. I'll probably check on them again in 10 years. btw, if you need a copy of Turbo Pascal 3.0 just let me know...

klipt 15y ago
You can get Turbo Pascal 5.5 off Embarcadero's (formerly Borland's) website: http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20803 http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20803 Of course, Free Pascal is a better modern alternative.