<story><title>How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web</title><url>http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-old-computer-to-the-web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JunkDNA</author><text>This is just wonderful. About three and a half years ago I booted the first real computer from my childhood as well: a Commodore Amiga 500. I had one mission and that was to clone the hard drive so that I could get all the stuff off of it before time had its way with the bits (there are excellent Amiga emulators that can actually run old OS). Not having any experience soldering, I would have been crushed if I had experienced the failure of a capacitor. Fortunately, fate was kind to me.&lt;p&gt;In that experience I learned how incredibly difficult it is to get things on and off of computers this old. Even though I lived through all the advances, my mind has a much rosier picture of the capabilities of old hardware than is actually true. Similar to this author, I had to rely on serial connections and some utilities developed by the Amiga emulation community running in Windows on an old PC to actually get it to work. And boy was it slow to move data. It took something like 48 hours to move about 80 megabytes of data. I was worried that was too long for such a machine to be running, but it held out. One of the partitions did have a tiny bit of corruption, but I was overall surprised to find most of the data intact.&lt;p&gt;Sadly, my shoebox full of disks is probably never to be recovered. Both floppy drives seem to be failing and reading Amiga floppies on modern hardware is possible, but an expensive pain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nfoz</author><text>Because of the inability of most modern PC floppy drives to read Amiga disks (since Amiga floppies use sectors outside of the appropriate &amp;quot;readable&amp;quot; range for PC disks, IIRC), it can be hard to convert Amiga disks to ROMs.&lt;p&gt;However, in ~2000 there was a mechanism discovered whereby you can take two PC 3.5&amp;quot; floppy drives and get a ROM from an Amiga disk.  The way it worked is you have one PC disk that will be destroyed, and you instruct the floppy controller to do a low-level floppy-to-floppy copy operation from the Amiga disk to the (burner) PC disk.  The CPU will listen in on the copy and get the full Amiga disk image, while the PC disk gets overwritten with junk.&lt;p&gt;I used this mechanism and saved all my old Amiga files, and happily play many of my old games (awesome retro demo-scene crackers&amp;#x2F;trainers included! yea!) using the UAE emulator to this day.</text></comment>
<story><title>How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web</title><url>http://www.keacher.com/1216/how-i-introduced-a-27-year-old-computer-to-the-web/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JunkDNA</author><text>This is just wonderful. About three and a half years ago I booted the first real computer from my childhood as well: a Commodore Amiga 500. I had one mission and that was to clone the hard drive so that I could get all the stuff off of it before time had its way with the bits (there are excellent Amiga emulators that can actually run old OS). Not having any experience soldering, I would have been crushed if I had experienced the failure of a capacitor. Fortunately, fate was kind to me.&lt;p&gt;In that experience I learned how incredibly difficult it is to get things on and off of computers this old. Even though I lived through all the advances, my mind has a much rosier picture of the capabilities of old hardware than is actually true. Similar to this author, I had to rely on serial connections and some utilities developed by the Amiga emulation community running in Windows on an old PC to actually get it to work. And boy was it slow to move data. It took something like 48 hours to move about 80 megabytes of data. I was worried that was too long for such a machine to be running, but it held out. One of the partitions did have a tiny bit of corruption, but I was overall surprised to find most of the data intact.&lt;p&gt;Sadly, my shoebox full of disks is probably never to be recovered. Both floppy drives seem to be failing and reading Amiga floppies on modern hardware is possible, but an expensive pain.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colanderman</author><text>&lt;i&gt;I had one mission and that was to clone the hard drive so that I could get all the stuff off of it before time had its way with the bits&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pff, hard drive?  In my day, everything we ever coded was stored on cassette tapes.  We never needed the computer itself to get them back, just a tape player, special software [1], and the good fortune that solar flares hadn&amp;#x27;t eaten all the bits yet.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://pokeystuff.com/cs1er/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;pokeystuff.com&amp;#x2F;cs1er&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>