Reviving ancient code

[Aviss,Tyler]

Impressive! were the disks fully restorable, or was some fill-in-the- 
blank work needed? I've never heard of floppies lasting so long.

How were they stored? There may be a lesson in that.


(sent from my phone, so please excuse the typos)

On 27-Jun-09, at 4:08 PM, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:

> Back in the early 90's, I worked with ROM staff to refurbish the solar
> telescope in the McLaughlin Planetarium. (You can still see the shaft
> poking out of the roof in the south east corner of the building).  
> When the
> planetarium was closed, the solar telescope was sold and disappeared  
> from
> view.
>
> A week ago I received a query from the Boonshoft Museum of Dayton  
> Ohio.
> They had purchased the hardware and it had sat around for a long, long
> time. The hard drive in the original computer was DOA, so they asked  
> if I
> had the original computer programs. I did, in my basement archives,  
> and
> sent them off. By my count, the Turbo Pascal code and the 68HC11  
> assembly
> language sat in my basement on 3.5 inch floppies, for 17 years before
> someone needed them again.
>
> They tell me that the solar telescope is now partially operational and
> undergoing commissioning.
>
> Anyone else have stories of having to retrieve code from a dusty  
> archive?
> Can you beat the 17 year interval? ;).
>
> Peter
>
>
> -- 
> Peter Hiscocks
> Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto
> http://www.syscompdesign.com
> USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator
> 647-839-0325
>
> --
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