Re: Media mortality (< facing your own mortality)

 > [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Nomad of Norad -- David C Hall

> li_sasxsek@NUTTER.NET wrote:
> > This thread has got me thinking not about conlangs carrying
> on after me,
> > but about the tinkering I had done in the past which is
> still may have on
> > those old 5.25" Apple II formatted floppies.  A couple years back, I
> > noticed a few people selling working Apple IIc's for $25-50
> on E-Bay so
> > I may just get one to transfer my old stuff to disk images.
>  I have some
> > good emulator programs to use them, and they run
> considerably faster than
> > the original computer.  I could always sell the computer
> once I've finished
> > transferring my files.
>
> I've still got just about all my old Radio Shack Color Computer
> floppies, and actually still have the old CoCo with floppy
> drive, so I
> could still read my old disks if I wanted to.
>
> There are programs for the peecee that will read CoCo
> floppies, though,
> so even without the CoCos I could still read the contents of
> them, I'd
> just need a 5.25" floppy drive.  I actually have a couple of those
> stored here for that express purpose.  You can still find
> them at older,
> small computer stores, the sort of place where they stockpile
> this stuff
> from machines they've dismantled for parts.
That's fine for the CoCo, but the Apple II was a very unique disk format. It's
unreadable by anything else becaus Apple didn't use a regular disk controller
chip like the others. They made a proprietary circuit of their own, which is
not compatible with any of the off-the-shelf disk controllers.

I had a bid for a complete IIC system on e-Bay last weekend but it got snapped
up by someone else at the last minute for $15.50. Not bad for a complete system
with monitor and printer, though I probably would have told the seller to keep
the printer to save the shipping costs.