Re: Media mortality (< facing your own mortality)

> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Mark J. Reed
> On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 3:11 PM,  <li_sasxsek@...> wrote:
> > That would be great if such a thing existed, but the Apple
> II had a proprietary disk interface (to save costs) so they
> don't work with the standard disk controller chips that others used.
>
> Ah, right, disk controller.  Sorry, I was thrown by my experience - I
> used a Commodore and the external disk drives were self-contained
> secondary computers, with the controller and even the DOS contained
> within the drive unit, and only a serial interface between them and
> the main cpu.  So you can hook them up to a PC pretty easily.
Yeah, I suppose if you know the protocol it uses, it would be pretty simple to write
a little program to transfer data from Commodore disk. And we used to criticize
them for use a slow 9600 baud serial port for a disk interface! The Apple II
interface was unique. It couldn't read disks from other machines, and vice
versa though most of the others had a certain level of interoperability with
the right software-hardware combination. For example, there were utility
programs for the early IBM PC's that could read disks from a variety of
different CP/M formats though Apple's wasn't one of them.

I basically have two options, both involve having an old Apple II series
computer. One is to connect it serially to one of my PC's and transfer the data
to .DSK disk images for my emulator programs to use. The other would be to get
a dialup internet account and upload the files I want to keep to an FTP site
where I could retrieve them. I'll probably use the disk images, even though
it's probably a lot of time consuming. I can still pull files directly from
those images. At this point, I'm just curious to see how many of those old
floppies are still readable. Some may date back as far as 1979!