And On This Farm He Had A Blog

@thrrgilag
The motors in those things were bullet proof. The stepper motor head actuators are another matter.

Those things had no "reference platter" like voice-coil actuators. Atmospheric pressure, heat, humidity, age..all of those things slightly move those things "off-true"

You used to have to "low level" those drives every year or so to assure that you would;t start losing data. There were some programs like Optune that sorta kinda did that for you in a non-destructive way.

As far as I know, this system has NEVER had that done in all these years. It is in Florida - Home of humidity, storms, etc. It has run the business since it was new.

It's pretty freaking incredible.

// @phoneboy

Once upon a time. A long, long time ago. I managed to get my hands on a Burroughs B9000 mini-computer.

I managed to get it up and running plus, with a stack of 132 column tractor-feed paper (No terminal. Just a teletype), a can of WD-40 (to 're-ink' that ancient ribbon),.. print out the oil company payroll that had crashed in 1977.

I had the perverse idea to print those checks out, somehow track down the recipients who were still among us, and mail them with the note: "Sorry for the delay". Neat joke but I never did it.

An old sysadmin from those days, retired, helped me get it up and running. (A big trial. Had to rig up some very clean 220V power, go though a bunch of arcane steps that may or may not have involved chicken entrails, etc.)

My thought was, "Once these guys are gone, no-one's going to know what to do with this stuff".

I never thought I would be sitting here now having similar thoughts about MS-DOS.

@thrrgilag Seagate ST-251. 42MB

// @phoneboy

@phoneboy LapLink Pro for DOS is the only solution in this case I can think of. That computer is too fragile to risk shipping here and even if they did, it's an MFM drive so putting it in a USB cradle of some sort is laughably out of the question.

@skematica This customer is still backing up. On 56 floppies as that is the way it was done back then. The chances of those disks being ~bible~ viable (damned autocorrect) now are like winning a lottery.

Makes me a nervous wreck.

When this is done, I'm imaging that drive, locating a IDE drive a little less decrepit than that 8GB Fujitsu, tossing the guts in a smaller case and putting the result in storage. It will happen to me again.

Only thing that remains is getting a DOS system up and running so I can test the transfer.

I'm having flashbacks

@kdfrawg Key West is absolutely beautiful.

@kdfrawg I have a fellow Bass Ale aficionado / customer in Daytona Beach with a house right on the beach itself. That is actually a good idea.

@jextxadore Welcome to my world. :(