[clug] Keeping Data Alive

[jm]

These are the short of things that may lead to virtualisation being big 
not just hypervisor/paravirtualisation, but rather emulation. Faking the 
old hardware so that the old OSes can be used to view old data stuck in 
legacy file formats only readable by the old applications which only run 
on the old OS on the old H/W. The really interesting bit (read 
difficult) is not faking the running platform but faking the I/O. I 
heard a while ago that tidbinbilla radio telescope replaced its PDP-11 
with an industrial computer which faked the PDP hardware to run the 
required apps (written in forth?), and went so far as to have an ISA 
board to mate to the telescope to control it. Unfortunately, I don't 
have any links/references to verify how correct this is. Anyway, you can 
imagine that with the pahsing ou of ISA buses in favour of various forms 
PCI buses that, unless there have changed again, that they must have 
been stock piling "old" PCs just in case something failed.

Jeff.


On 22/02/10 2:37 PM, Andrew Janke wrote:
>> I have a fruit box of 8" floppy disks, various boxes of old obsolete
>> magnetic tapes etc
>>
>> All of which are not much good without  the media reader but more
>> importantly
>> the O/S, application software and user knowledge to read them.
>>      
> I use spinning disks (and open formats) as much as possible.  I keep
> buying a bigger spinning disk and copy everything old over and where
> possible converting all old files to text.
>
> Mind you I still have a bunch of old Macintosh Word 1? format files
> that are proving difficult to read with anything. :(  I found these a
> few months back in a zip archive and am yet to find something to read
> them.
>
> I may have to find someone with a Mac SE/30 or something...
>
> ark!
>
> --
> Andrew Janke
> (a.janke at gmail.com || http://a.janke.googlepages.com/)
> Canberra->Australia    +61 (402) 700 883
>