[MCRed]

I cut my teeth programming this machine and learning the ins and outs of how it worked. We were much closer to the hardware in those days-- you could have things like disks that wouldn't work on some machines because the variance of the resistor in the disk drive caused a slight incompatibility when you tried to read data from a nonexistent track that only exists in the custom made disks the program originally came on but that doesn't exist in the operating system (which formats the disk you put the program on when you copy)... and which most disks with custom assembly code can read, but your particular drive cannot.

In 2008 I spent 6 months going thru my Apple II collection, many of the disks had spent years in a garage in Louisiana and Texas. Surprisingly most were still readable, but I lost some terrible poetry and equally terrible letters to my high school sweetheart (turns out she wasn't so sweet as an adult.)

IF you have Apple // disks, or any kind of old format, I urge you to recover it NOW. Time is not on your side.

I had a DEC Tape from the 1980s that eventually I think I just threw away because I couldn't find anyone on the internet who could read the data.

[StillBored]

I have literally a thousand or so floppies (apple II, PC, some CPM). The vast majority weren't legitimate. A few years ago I went through and retrieved some of the ones with my own personal work on them. But the vast majority sit around waiting for the oxide to fall off.

I was actually thinking the other day it might be amusing to upload the text editor I wrote in applesoft basic to github.

I was lucky I guess, most of the ones I recovered worked, but the recovery process (IIGS, via appletalk to 68k mac, to pc via ethernet) is such a PITA, I quit after the first 5 or 6...

I figured that most of the games and apps were available in some of the abandonware collections that my pirated copies weren't really worth recovering.

[duskwuff]

Jason Scott has written a bit on the impending doom of 5¼" disks:

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191

[digi_owl]

Those kinds of copy resistance schemes did a number on most disk drives, as they would often force the drive to violate operational limits.

[sehugg]

I transferred most of my disks in the mid-90s and even back then many of them were corrupt. (I also lived in the south FWIW)