> On Jan 19, 2023, at 6:03 PM, Jim Brain via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> On 1/19/2023 3:38 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
>>
>>> On Jan 19, 2023, at 4:31 PM, rar--- via cctalk <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Museum Staff Helps Exonerate David Veney
>>>
>>> January 19, 2023, Hunt Valley, MD — Staff members of the System Source
>>> Computer Museum recently completed a project that helped exonerate David
>>> Veney, wrongly convicted of rape in 1997. In 2005, after Mr. Veney sought a
>>> new trial, the state found irregularities in the prosecution, released Mr.
>>> Veney from prison, and declined to re-prosecute. ...
>> Wow. That is a marvelous story.
>>
>> Just one comment: using the GreaseWeazle makes sense here, but other options
>> would include seeking out the help of the community. For example, 5.25 inch
>> floppy drives are widely available, and reading RX50 format on an ordinary
>> drive in Linux is a trivial exercise. Similarly, feeding the recovered
>> device image to a SIMH instance would be easy enough. The tricky task of
>> translating the application data to readable text still remains in any of
>> those approaches, of course.
>>
>> paul
>>
> I see it as seeking out the community. Your point probably is about casting
> a wider net to individuals, but I think asking an organization to help
> creates more comfort, especially if you're talking about irreplaceable data
> like this. Given the age of the disk and the expectation for errors, even if
> a single community member had been asked, I doubt they would try to read it
> from Linux or similar. It's an option, yes, but not a recommended one, since
> you might have limited reads available, and a flux read gives you maximum
> data with minimum effort.
True. But if it is known to be a DEC (RX50) disk, reading it from Linux is a
well known standard thing to do. I have been doing it for more than 20 years,
with RSTSFLX (writing, too). Standard PC floppies have no trouble at all, you
just have to set the mode to 10 sectors per track.
Earlier still I did the same in DOS, using INT13 programming under djgcc.
My point here is that the community is substantial and contains vast expertise
on many details of old machinery. So my guess is that an email to the list
saying "hey, I need to recover the contents of files on an RSX RX50 floppy,
what is the easiest and most reliable way to do that" would have produced
several high quality anwers in a matter of hours.
> Your SIMH thought makes a ton of sense. Not knowing the effort here, I would
> assume once the flux image was available and with the lack of SW to do much
> with the data available anyway, treating it like a raw data dump was probably
> the most expedient option to get to the end goal.
I was thinking that having the OS interpret the file structure would take that
part of complexity away. At that point you're still left with the question of
the application data format, but details of on disk structure are covered this
way.
paul
>
> Jim
>
> --
> Jim Brain
> [email protected]
> www.jbrain.com
>
