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.
On Thu, 19 Jan 2023, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote:
SysSrc has a web presence with an accessible front end and--most
importantly--promotion. In comparison, to "enter" the CC list, you have to
walk down a dark alleyway to an unmarked door and knock. Not at all the
same thing.
It is true there is a tremendous amount of expertise bursting forth from
the members of this mailing list, but if we are to put ourselves out there
as willing to volunteer for such work, there has to be promotion.
1) What would ChatGPT say was the best, safest, and most reliable way to
recover ireplaceable files and file contents from an RX50 diskette?
2) As approached, it was multiple stages:
read flux transitions,
decipher sectors
decipher file system to find appropriate file(s) (manually?)
make sense out of the file contents.
They did a good job of reinventing the wheel.
Lots of people have the hardware and maybe software to do the first two
Somebody with appropriate hardware/software might be able to trivially do
the first three.
The final step calls for the stenogrphy software and the original
sstenographer, which they managed to do.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred [email protected]
