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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Wed May 11, 2022 9:08 am 

Joined: Sun Aug 22, 2004 5:55 pm
Posts: 985
Location: Warren, PA
My natural pack-rat tendencies are overly reinforced in this area.

Since I first got involved in PC's about 1989 with my very own Packard Bell 286, I've saved at least one intact entire computer system of each major operating system. That one goes back to Windows 3.3 and even that was a force. I've got that, Win95, Win98, XP, Win7, Win10.... The only one I didn't preserve was the original Radio Shack CoCo that I got in 1982, (DOS 1.0) that was by all definition, a cursed system.

The point remains that there's some value in keeping a system intact for this very purpose, retrieving old documents, checking media, etc. Considering the market value of the system vs. the value of the contents, it's a no-brainer just to squirrel a system away someplace, marked 'do not discard', etc. One thing though is that you can all but forget internet access off of these now, browser to web interface has rapidly changed.

I had to fire one up lately to retrieve some very old Iomega backups and transfer them to other media for a client, turned into a hero for being able to do it at all.

For the basic pile of floppies, an external floppy disk drive on a USB plug is a pretty inexpensive option, those still seem to work OK. What gets a lot dicier now is parallel printer ports for Iomega drives, and most recently, anything that resembles CDR or DVD, those have also gone external.

My oldest son has turned into a vintage computer collector and loves my old 286, he's now a software engineer and that 286 was his first exposure to computers.


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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2022 11:48 pm 

Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2005 7:16 am
Posts: 1998
A couple more "off topic" observations.

I was working on a pair of computers this week that had been sequentially upgraded through to newer versions of Windows. Over the years they had slowed down considerably. These were machines with enough good features that it was worth putting a fresh installation of Windows 10 on each of them. It is incredible how much better they work afterwards, with exactly the same hardware and memory.

And on the topic of computer memory, it is worthwhile to "max" it out on any good computer. Memory is very cheap now for most machines, and more memory usually provides a noticeable improvement in performance.

The stock memory on some older computers might have been adequate for previous Windows versions, but can be barely adequate for Windows 10, which really runs much better with at least 8GB of memory.

PC

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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2022 3:17 pm 

Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2005 7:16 am
Posts: 1998
Just wanted to add that this is a good time to upgrade older computers to solid state SSD type drives if you will be keeping them for a while. The 500gig SSD upgrade kits are going for about $50 right now and some come with the software and USB adapter cables to let you duplicate your C: HDD to the new SSD, then just swap them. This works well back to Windows 7, if you want to do it with Windows XP it may require some knowledge of drive formatting. Perhaps someone else on RYPN has done this and can comment.

Keep in mind that Windows XP is the LAST system that can run some of the 1990s locomotive programming and download software, so a good XP laptop with an RS232 port and a durable SSD might be much more useful than you would at first expect. My friend at the local commuter agency tells me they have about three dozen software packages still in use that require older laptops and operating systems to support them.

PC

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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2022 12:12 am 

Joined: Fri Mar 14, 2014 11:44 pm
Posts: 198
PCook wrote:
Keep in mind that Windows XP is the LAST system that can run some of the 1990s locomotive programming and download software, so a good XP laptop with an RS232 port and a durable SSD might be much more useful than you would at first expect. My friend at the local commuter agency tells me they have about three dozen software packages still in use that require older laptops and operating systems to support them.

PC


Another route is to use a virtual machine or an emulator to allow a modern PC to run ancient operating systems and software. Keeping old hardware alive is fun but eventually, unless you have an inventory of all imaginable spare parts, something is going to fail that you can't fix.


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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2022 3:26 am 

Joined: Sun Apr 02, 2017 3:13 am
Posts: 129
JeffH wrote:
Keeping old hardware alive is fun but eventually, unless you have an inventory of all imaginable spare parts, something is going to fail that you can't fix.


Just like railway preservation?


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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2022 8:09 pm 

Joined: Thu May 24, 2012 1:37 pm
Posts: 2213
Is there an easy and straightforward way to put a modern SSD in an XT? The thing won't physically address that kind of storage capacity... and I don't know of anything running on that hardware that would partition the drive into the number of volumes that would suit...

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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Sun Jun 19, 2022 8:27 pm 

Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2005 7:16 am
Posts: 1998
I may be able to let you know whether Windows XP can work with SSD sometime soon, as I have an XP machine regularly used for locomotive downloads that already has a 500Gb HDD, and might benefit from an SSD installation. My understanding is XP has IDE drivers but not the SATA drivers needed for SDD, you have to install them separately.

I recently installed the PNY 1T Solid State Drive kit on a Dell D630 (a very common computer for doing locomotive downloads) with Windows 7. It took 45 minutes to clone the drive and 5 minutes to swap the SSD with the HDD, but on this type of computer the drive is in a pocket where it is directly accessible, and does not require further disassembly of the machine. This was a good running machine before the drive swap, it is even better now. Just a few seconds from "power on" to being available for work.

Why put effort into a Windows 7 machine? Because it has multiple software packages that were widely used in developing railroad industry technical publications 20 years ago and are now hard to replace. It provides a particular service and no longer is used on the internet. And it can download some locomotives where the software support is post-XP.

PC

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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Mon Jun 20, 2022 10:07 am 

Joined: Thu May 24, 2012 1:37 pm
Posts: 2213
I meant XT, not XP (I understood his reference to be to the PC-XT, the 'extended' version of the original Boca Raton IBM PC). The older machines, particularly those using DOS, had memory address limitations related to word size. It might be possible to access an external SSD by installing a USB card in one of the XT slots, but you'd have to partition the drive using software the XT could understand, into what might be an enormous number of small drives of accessible size. An 80MB drive used to be enormous, all the storage anyone could possibly need, in the late Eighties -- at which point the XT was already far below performance of newer generations -- and this may indicate the magnitude of the concern.

I have not heard of particular difficulties adapting either XP Pro or Win 7 to use SSD... the hardware problem would be more significant than writing or obtaining software drivers. I don't think any 32-bit system would have major difficulty accessing current drive sizes, let alone something 64-bit.

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Last edited by Overmod on Tue Jun 21, 2022 9:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Mon Jun 20, 2022 1:20 pm 

Joined: Thu Oct 08, 2015 11:54 am
Posts: 1773
Location: New Franklin, OH
Overmod wrote:
Is there an easy and straightforward way to put a modern SSD in an XT? The thing won't physically address that kind of storage capacity... and I don't know of anything running on that hardware that would partition the drive into the number of volumes that would suit...

We’re really getting into the the weeds here. I know you can format an SSD with FAT32 but that only gets you back to WIN95, not DOS 2.0. If you can format to FAT16 or 12, I couldn’t tell you if the XT would recognize it to do so. I’m guessing there might be a size recognition limitation you may run into, also. A 20 mb HDD was pretty big in those days.

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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 4:52 am 

Joined: Mon Sep 28, 2015 12:30 am
Posts: 290
There's a XT-IDE adapter for using modern storage devices on XT machines. I watched a video on it a year or two back on one of the classic computer restoration channels on YouTube (Maybe Adrian Black's channel).

I don't think you're able to utilize most of the space though (I remember something about a 256mb partition limit, iirc). Rather it's about reliability and being able to easily bring data back and forth between the classic machine and a modern PC.


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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 9:17 am 

Joined: Thu May 24, 2012 1:37 pm
Posts: 2213
Most of the XT-IDE cars I've seen can be understood technically by their Compact Flash support. I have no experience with using an in-slot adapter to utilize a more modern flash-memory card... but even there, you wouldn't be able to use any currently sold flash-memory size without trouble...

PC pretty well hit the sweet spot with the machine running 98SE as far as the ability to load and run programs that can access, read and transfer from 5-¼" floppy media. That leads to another fun issue: some of the older software is not easily available as originally packaged or as source code, and some of the 'better' programs were copy-protected in a way that almost defies common sense -- there were codes keyed to specific physical locations on the hard disk and if you 'optimized' with something like fdisk you'd most likely lose access "forever". The LeBlond software (which ran inside the almost-unobtanium Lotus 1-2-3 v.2.01) that would be the most logical 'ancient' software to work with forgotten word-processing formats was one example of this -- further complicated by its insane Alt-F10 start key combination. Much of this was forgotten lore by the mid-Nineties...

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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 1:48 pm 

Joined: Thu Aug 05, 2010 2:06 am
Posts: 329
One point I'd like to bring up is a slight fault in the perception of the SSD. While it is far more physically rugged than the spinning drive as it doesn't have mechanical moving parts it still has a finite lifetime. That lifetime is expressed in read/write cycles.

I'm not knocking the SSD, it is a great tool and I'm happy to utilize it myself but like any other man-made object it is not absolutely perfect. In light to moderate use a person may not get to the end of the cycles but in server and mass array use their life is generally measured in years. Some will even have on-board routines that will issue warning messages as they near the maximum guaranteed count.


Don't be afraid to use then, simply be aware that they actually do wear out. Enjoy their additional speed.

In my case I was on Win7 Pro at the time I bought my SSD. A friend had a multiple drive "shoe" which allowed me to pull my spinning drive, plug it in to the appropriate slot, plug in the SSD and clone the drives. I then installed the SSD and it booted up lightning fast without skipping a beat on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop.

On a related note, if using a SSD as disconnected storage that is kept on a shelf the drive will need to be plugged in and at least accessed from time to time to keep from loosing data. The spinning drive stores the bits as magnetic changes on the disc and those store well for many years without any intervention. The SSD stores the bits as electrical charges and those charges will leak off no matter how good the device is (at least to the present state of the art). Plugging the drive in and accessing it causes the drive to check the data and re-charge the bits to their original assumed level. If too much of the charge leaks off then the software may assume the wrong level and re-write an incorrect bit and things crash quickly. Right now I cannot quote the proper recommendations but if you copy off a piece of firmware or data to SSD and throw it in a drawer for a few years it may not be there when you try to retrieve it.

Hopefully someone who is further in the weeds on this will post with more specifics than I have here to the benefit of us all.....................mld


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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Tue Jun 21, 2022 8:44 pm 

Joined: Thu May 24, 2012 1:37 pm
Posts: 2213
There is a comparatively recent "test to destruction" of some of the near-current SSDs. The number of read/writes they accommodate before degrading can be ridiculously large, far above the several hundred thousand cycles of early flash-based technology.

In some cases this is done by providing capacity 'in parallel' with the bits stored in multiple locations; when some go bad they are switched out for reserve. I don't think there are low-level tools that let you scan and manipulate this; the absolute drive capacity is too large.

I was disappointed to find the WOR< drives, which were supposed to be a gold standard for archival storage, apparently turned out to be no such thing -- CDs and DVDs even less so. At one time we were looking at a technology that used glass platters with the 'pits' physically formsd inside them -- I don't see major degradation of that structure, BUT once you write it, that's it and that's that.

I will have to look into whether the SSD does 'drive maintenance' refresh when it is powered on without a controller: if so, simply plugging the drive into power once a year or so might be sufficient to retain the information. I don't think it is dangerous to plug a computer with this as connected equipment in 'once every few years' and check the data -- in a pinch just plug it in and clone the drive contents -- that will refresh the drive internals as well as make a fresh full-strength copy...

I am tempted to comment that either SSDs or modern memory cards used for the archival purposes PC mentioned ought to last a good way toward the heat death of the universe before they start to "fatigue"...

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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Fri Jun 24, 2022 11:36 pm 

Joined: Fri Mar 14, 2014 11:44 pm
Posts: 198
You guys are getting way off into the weeds. This is a great discussion -- for a computer history museum!

I'll go into this siding for a brief moment. If you are talking about the IBM PC-XT, early 1980s vintage, it used what we called "MFM" drives. These had a 34 position (I think) card edge connection and a second connector, I think 20 position, plus the 4 pole Molex connector for power. MFM was analog: the hard drive controller card stepped the heads and did the A/D conversion and coding (using Modified Frequency Modulation or MFM) between 1s and 0s and the voltage impulses in the heads.

Later, I think in the early 1990s, Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) took over, with the familiar 40 pin connector. That was a digital command/response interface, with the A/D and head positioning stuff now integrated onto a small PCB attached to the HDA. Another name for IDE was ATA because it was first developed as an option for the PC-AT.

Later still, the ATA/IDE interface was electrically redesigned so it transmits commands and responses via a serial protocol, hence Serial ATA (SATA). While there are adapter kits between SATA and IDE, I don't think there is an equivalent to emulate the older analog MFM or "Seagate" interface with the two cables, because that would require emulating the drive at an analog level.

And let's not even get into some of the other ancient disk interfaces, like ESDI or the various flavors of (parallel) SCSI with their lovely terminator resistors.

Now, back to the mainline. If the topic is retrieving old documents, or keeping proprietary interface software alive, i said again: emulate! I have an ancient device made by Polaroid that is sort of a reverse scanner: you give it TIFF images, and it will expose a roll of 35mm film. The software only ran in DOS 5.0, and used a Centronics (parallel printer) port interface. I can still run it today, on modern hardware, using a DOS emulator. Whatever your software ran on, IBM PCs, Atari 800s, Commodore 64s, PDP-11s, there is an emulator. Sometimes getting the hardware interface part working is a pain, but unless there was something unusually proprietary, it is almost always possible.


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 Post subject: Re: OT - Old Format Electronic Document Retrieval
PostPosted: Sat Jun 25, 2022 3:23 am 

Joined: Sun Aug 22, 2004 11:54 pm
Posts: 2367
PCook wrote:
Eric, you just reminded me to order a IDE/SATA 2.5/3.5/USB drive adapter. They are indeed a potentially very useful device.

They have also got floppy drives with a USB plug that you can use with a computer that does not have a permanent drive installed.

PC


I bought a USB floppy drive, because I have a copy of Lotus Improv on 3.5''s. Lotus Improv was re-imagining of their 1-2-3 spreadsheet product that used dynamic formula based cell references, rather than positional fixed references. Lotus really confused their customers with 1-2-3, Improv and the paired down suite in Symphony and it's not quite as intuitive, even though it's more powerful and easily edited. Once Excel incorporated pivot tables, it was a good enough alternative that didn't require abandoning rows and columns

https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2005/1 ... us-improv/

I actually managed to get that to operate on Win XP (that PC still had a built in floppy) and I think I got it to load on Win 7 as well. I haven't tried in on Win 10, and I suspect it may not run, as I think Windows 10 doesn't allow 16 bit, and I suspect it will be less likely to run on Win 11.

The other problem will be that (especially in thin.light laptops) the USB-A is going to give way to all USB-C. I have A to C adapters, but running the old thing is becoming more and more a Rube Goldberg contraption.

Old software/data is a passion for some folks. They may be of help retrieving old data/software.

Some folks rebooted the Apollo 11 guidance computer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh_gP5aF3ys

Now if you need an Iomega Zip Drive...


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