I was going through a drawer in my file cabinet and came across a bunch of 3.5 inch floppies. These are now approximately 28 years old and approaching their expected use life of around 30 years. I thought “Why don’t I get a USB floppy drive and see if I can back up any documents and such that are still on these disks?” So, I did.
I was going to just attach the USB floppy drive to my Ubuntu machine and do it all from there, but for some reason Ubuntu really didn’t like the floppy drive and it was making bad noises and not working at all… So, I dug out the emergency Acer Windows 10 micro laptop that I keep for just these “I need an actual hardware device running Windows to do this thing…” sorta moments. Windows 10 was very happy with the floppy drive and I started to inspect the disks. Before a single file showed up I was transported back 30 years, the sound of the disk slotting into the drive, the shingggg noise as the metal shield pulled back from the media, the whirring and clacking of the disk spinning and the head seeking all sounds that I haven’t heard on a regular basis in decades.
Many of the disks are backups of Dana’s archaeology work, papers, databases, and her dissertation from grad school and beyond. So, digital archaeology of actual archaeology… I immediately ran into some interesting file format issues. At the time in the 1990’s I was working for Lotus Development Corporation (best known for the popular and best spreadsheet program 1-2-3) and so Dana was using Lotus software on DOS to do her work. The first word processor was Lotus Manuscript ( gone into the depths of time, only a Wikipedia entry to mark it’s passing ) and then Lotus AmiPro followed by Lotus WordPro ( similarly gone ) when she moved to Windows later. There are no import filters to read those file formats because Lotus lost the office suite wars with Microsoft and IBM had no interest in that market post acquisition.
Thank goodness for retro-gamers, they have built great emulators for both DOS and early Windows so that they can run vintage games. Because games tend to max out all kinds of capabilities of these environments, the emulators are more than adequate to run original office software if you can get disk images of it. I happen to have original Lotus SmartSuite 97 CD-ROMs (I worked on 1-2-3 for Windows 97 so I got a box of product when we shipped it, back when software came in boxes). I installed it under PlayOnLinux (a wrapper around the WINE windows API emulator for Linux) and very shortly had the applications running. They are VERY FAST on my 16 core 3.60 GHz desktop, the fastest computer of the time was around 50 MHz, and they were written to be fast on those, so even in an emulator which must have a lot of overhead they scream.
Because Lotus was always a very customer oriented company, we actually shipped a high fidelity file import filter for Lotus Manuscript 2.0 in Lotus Wordpro 97 and it works a treat to read Dana’s oldest documents.
Next problem was a database that Dana used for cataloging all of her artifacts and creating the tables and appendices for her dissertation. It was called Q&A from Symantec and we chose it at the time because it had a really simple form builder that let us model the same recording sheets she was using in the field while excavating. We were on the cutting edge at the time… So again, you’ve never heard of Q&A and that’s because it was crushed by many other more popular databases including one from Microsoft. Fortunately we still had the disks… I just copied them all into a folder on Linux and used Dosbox ( one of many MSDOS emulators ) to run the program… and it just works… it came up and read the original files and could query them and generate tables etc… very cool.
There were some disks that contained files created by the MSDOS backup tool… These I can’t get to restore, I may figure it out eventually, but even running actual MSDOS 6.22 in a virtual machine I can’t seem to get the restore program to read them. I’ll keep digging, there are hints out there on the interwebs that folks have figured this out.
I found a couple of disks that belonged to me and that contained backups of source code for a program I had been writing from 1991-1993 in my own time. It was written originally in Borland Turbo C and some assembly language. So strange to look at code 28 years later, I immediately had all kinds of memories come back of where I was and what I was doing then. The program was building a .COM executable which modern Windows won’t even load. These programs were essentially a single 64k code segment and a 64k data segment, no fixups, no dynamic linking, just a code image that got plopped into memory and executed. Most software nowadays doesn’t even draw breath in under 64k… And the program still runs nicely in Dosbox and does it’s thing like it was yesterday.
Now these files are getting safely backed up for the next 30 years along with the software to read them. I think there are some more floppies lurking in the basement, I may dig them out and do some more digging…