Reading NeXTstep disk

On 14/5/2005 10:14 AM, "Paul Guinnessy" <pkgmac.com> spake thus:

> This is actually a problem I think more and more people are going to
> have in the future... trying to read files in a format that doesn't
> exist anymore. How long until the original 400K 3.5 Mac floppy disk
> format becomes unreadable?

If you dig around you can probably find old hardware easily enough, so
that's not so much of an issue. The *real* problems are the longevity and
availability of media for those devices. I haven't checked for many years
now, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that many of my old Mac floppies
(800K and 1.4M) are now unreadable, just due to natural deterioration of the
media (a non-optimal storage environment doesn't help :) I wouldn't be
surprised to find that you can't buy (new) floppies that would work in the
old hardware any more, either (or if you can, they won't be cheap).

A different but related problem is file formats. Doesn't matter if you can
read the disks if you don't have the application to open the file. Word
under Windows is particularly bad in this regard --- if I recall correctly
it only allows you to open files going back two or three versions. Got a
Word file from 1990? Bad luck. (Interestingly, Mac Word doesn't seem to do
this --- it can open Word 5 files quite happily.)

I'm slowly working on converting our departmental technical report series
into PDF form. Many of the early ones now only exist in paper form, so I
just scan those, but for some I have the original files in a mixture of
WordPerfect, Word and LaTeX. The LaTeX documents just work; the Word
documents can be opened in Word 2004, but the WordPerfect documents are just
a pain because we don't have WordPerfect. I was able to import them somewhat
imperfectly into Word, but this only really got the text, so I still need to
do some scanning and manual correction. I got lucky in this case --- I could
just as easily have ended up having to scan the hard copies of these papers
as well.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

>Not a usual request for this list, but incase anyone knows of any tool
>out there to do this....
>
>A university researcher I know has come across from files from the NeXT
>(NeXTStep) operating system on a floppy disk that he needs to convert to
>windows (or to Mac) but he can't find a tool to do so (or a copy of
>NeXTStep at his university).
>
>Does anyone have any advice on how to read these files? Is there a
>utilty he can use?

I do not know of any Mac utility he can use, but there are still
plenty of old NeXTstations out there (I own two, and actively used
one until not too long ago).

The NeXT box can read and write Mac floppies, but probably best to
copy it over a network, and Mac floppies are also a dinosaur. Just be
glad he does't have his data on a MO drive from a NeXT Cube!

Anyway, have him look for somebody nearby with a functioning NeXT box.


--

Chuck Goolsbee V.P. Technical Operations
_________________________________________________________________
digital.forest Phone: +1-877-720-0483, x2001
where Internet solutions grow Int'l: +1-206-838-1630
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I don't have a clear suggestiong for you but I faced a similar
situation a long time ago in my first corporate job. The old data
center had been on Wang computers and not all the (8" I think) floppy
disks were migrated to 5 3/4 floppies when they moved to PCs. We
deteremined after the last of the Wangs had been retired that we
needed access to some archival information that was only on the
outsized format floppys. We went to a data recovery specialist and
they were able to transfer the data to a supplied harddrive and we
could then parse the files using a basic text editor. Luckily our data
was text-based if you've got binaries I suppose the transfer would be
much more complicated.

My last job in the US was with a postcard printing company and they
had a custom developed backend direct-to-plate system that was run
from NeXT boxes and had a number of them still around and running
because of this in 2002. I'm still in contact with some of the IS guys
there so if you can't get help at your local datacenter I coud put you
in touch with them.

Christopher Appell
European Market
FreeRecruiting.com

On 15 May 2005, at 10:08 , chuck goolsbee wrote:
> Anyway, have him look for somebody nearby with a functioning NeXT box.

Or, depending on the value of the data, simply buy one off ebay. A
functioning NeXT can be had for under $200 if you look.



--
Hi, I'm Gary Cooper, but not the Gary Cooper that's dead.

Nigel Stanger wrote:
> If you dig around you can probably find old hardware easily enough, so
> that's not so much of an issue. The *real* problems are the longevity and
> availability of media for those devices. I haven't checked for many years
> now, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that many of my old Mac floppies
> (800K and 1.4M) are now unreadable, just due to natural deterioration of the
> media (a non-optimal storage environment doesn't help :) I wouldn't be
> surprised to find that you can't buy (new) floppies that would work in the
> old hardware any more, either (or if you can, they won't be cheap).

They're not *that* fragile. Several years ago (2001, I think, but it
could have been 2002) I went through my entire collection of floppies
(100+) with the only machine I had left that could read both 400k and
800k floppies, my Powerbook 165 (since deceased). I copied the contents
of each floppy onto a Zip drive connected to the Powerbook. Once all
the floppies were copied, I moved the Zip disk to the Zip drive on my
Performa 6400 (since retired into its box), and used cdrecord to burn a
CD. The oldest floppies I had were the original boot floppies that came
with my 512k Mac, so that made them roughly 15 years old at the time. I
made images of them, and they're burned onto the CD. The others were
from various times over those 15 years. I don't remember having
trouble with many of the floppies, maybe 2 or 3 out of the 100+.

Last year, I went through the same process with all of my Zip disks,
since I'm now down to one machine that can read them. When that machine
dies (a beige G3), I'll toss out all the floppies and the Zips, since
I've now transferred everything I want onto other media and I won't have
any other machines that can read them.


--
Paul Schinder
schinderpobox.com

On 17/5/2005 10:38 AM, "Paul Schinder" <schinderpobox.com> spake thus:

> I don't remember having
> trouble with many of the floppies, maybe 2 or 3 out of the 100+.

It does depend how they've been stored. One of the guys at work remarked to
me the other day that he had found that floppies survived better if they
were stacked up flat rather than on their edges. My response was that
stacking them vertically obviously caused the bits to slide off :)

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

Reading NeXTstep disk [ ... ]

> Nigel Stanger wrote: > If you dig around you can probably find old hardware easily enough, > so that's not so much of an issue. The *real* problems are the > longevity and availability of media for those devices. [ ... ] > Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND. > http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger [ ... ] Posted by: schinder Date: May 17, 2005. They're not *that* fragile. Several years ago (2001, I think, but it could have been 2002) I went through my entire collection of floppies (100+) with the only machine I had left that could read both 400k and 800k floppies, my Powerbook 165 (since deceased). I copied the contents of each floppy onto a Zip drive connected to the Powerbook. [ ... ] Last year, I went through the same process with all of my Zip disks, since I'm now down to one machine that can read them. When that machine dies (a beige G3), I'll toss out all the floppies and the Zips, since I've now transferred everything I want onto other media and I won't have any other machines that can read them. [ ... ] Paul Schinder schinder[Image]pobox.com

Right. You solved your problem by acknowledging that you won't have any way of reading old media, or the future need, and had the means, the still functioning machinery, and the awareness to do it. What of future librarians, archivists and researchers, or families? The possible assumption that all that has been put onto "dead" media formats that needs to be transferred or updated has been archived is perhaps a bit early to state. Are we able to say that all the material "saved" or "archived" in/onto these obsolete formats has no historical--even a personal or family-history--value ... much less some other future value? Think of the Civil War letters and photographs for a minute--a whole minute--and then imagine the almost total loss of personal supporting historical material--personally recorded material--of a rather interesting thirty-year+ period of time, lost forever if data wasn't transferred (unedited, totus), or committed to a paper print at some point in time.

Is there anybody out there who has used a word processor format no longer supported, stored those files on a disc/disk format no longer able to be read? Just a guess: all of us? Want to look at the old letters and papers for a "year-book moment?" Clear up a "memory issue?" Oh, well.

I remain somewhat skeptical that a complete historical record could ever exist, but a bit of forethought into the all-but-certain future of controlled proprietary data formats, subscription software access (just to be able to read and write) and of DRM locked everything else, might be in order.

Apologies if this is perhaps a bit OT, but somehow it became related in my head today--please think of it as a personal attempt at recording an individual observation of family history ... not put on a NeXTStep disk.

[The archivist world deals with this all the time (and I'm pretty sure we've had this discussion on TidBITS Talk in the past too). The two basic approaches are to maintain hardware that can read these old media and to migrate the bits forward to new media before it's a major problem. The other issue is file format, which can be dealt with either by maintaining a machine that can run the software necessary to read old formats natively, or by converting to newer formats. And of course, creating an analog copy is always an option. -Adam]

Greg gregpuza (at) earthlink (dot) net

> And of course, creating an analog copy is always an option. -Adam]

Just be sure to make a Rosetta Stone too, in case your language becomes a
dead one 8-)

Kevin

On 18 May 2005, at 15:40 , gregpuza wrote:
> Is there anybody out there who has used a word processor format no
> longer supported, stored those files on a disc/disk format no longer
> able to be read? Just a guess: all of us? Want to look at the old
> letters and papers for a "year-book moment?" Clear up a "memory
> issue?"
> Oh, well.

This is a main reason that I no longer use any proprietary format for
written text. I switched from Word 5 ages ago and everything now is
plain old text. If it can't be plain old text, then it is HTML or
LaTeX -> PDF.


--
"Last night - you were unhinged. You were like some desperate,
howling demon. You frightened me. - Do it again!"

On 5/18/05 2:40 PM, Adam interjected into "gregpuza"
<gregpuzaearthlink.net>'s message

> [The archivist world deals with this all the time (and I'm pretty sure we've
> had this discussion on TidBITS Talk in the past too). The two basic approaches
> are to maintain hardware that can read these old media and to migrate the bits
> forward to new media before it's a major problem. The other issue is file
> format, which can be dealt with either by maintaining a machine that can run
> the software necessary to read old formats natively, or by converting to newer
> formats. And of course, creating an analog copy is always an option. -Adam]

There is a third approach, used by the US Government (probably among
others): spend multiple $millions buying one-off hardware that can read
data off the old format storage, and buying one-off utilities to translate
the data--when translation is needed--to modern file formats. Of course,
the government gets to do this under the normal procurement rules, which
triple (or more) the cost.

  --John

On 5/18/05 11:34 PM, "Google Kreme" <gkremegmail.com> wrote:

> On 18 May 2005, at 15:40 , gregpuza wrote:
>> Is there anybody out there who has used a word processor format no
>> longer supported, stored those files on a disc/disk format no longer
>> able to be read? Just a guess: all of us? Want to look at the old
>> letters and papers for a "year-book moment?" Clear up a "memory
>> issue?"
>> Oh, well.
>
> This is a main reason that I no longer use any proprietary format for
> written text. I switched from Word 5 ages ago and everything now is
> plain old text. If it can't be plain old text, then it is HTML or
> LaTeX -> PDF.

openOffice.org uses XML files for everything. The format is published in
great detail. Of course, as one of the 0.001% of computer users conversant
with LaTeX, you don't need that.

  --John

Message #10: Re: Reading NeXTstep disk Posted by: jwblist Date: May 18, 2005.

On 5/18/05 2:40 PM, Adam interjected into "gregpuza" <gregpuza[Image]earthlink.net>'s message

> [The archivist world deals with this all the time (and I'm pretty > sure we've had this discussion on TidBITS Talk in the past too). > The two basic approaches are to maintain hardware that can read > these old media and to migrate the bits forward to new media before > it's a major problem. The other issue is file > format, which can be dealt with either by maintaining a machine > that can run the software necessary to read old formats natively, > or by converting to newer formats. And of course, creating an analog > copy is always an option. > -Adam]

There is a third approach, used by the US Government (probably among others): spend multiple $millions buying one-off hardware that can read data off the old format storage, and buying one-off utilities to translate the data--when translation is needed--to modern file formats. Of course, the government gets to do this under the normal procurement rules, which triple (or more) the cost.

--John

Very brief comments since, as Adam pointed out, some bits of this were touched on in past TidBITS.

First, it was the name "NeXtStep" that caught my attention because I seem to remember something important was once written and/or programmed on a NeXT box somewhere, and if that little bit of history is unreadable I feel it to be somewhat of a loss to all concerned.

And second, the idea that any company would SEEK to make common universal global communication proprietary and restricted seems at odds to a certain sort of progress.

And lastly, that after all the time and brilliant effort expended, that at least one single graphicly capable format, even a 'PDF'--which appears (perhaps only to the uninformed like me) to be changing a bit--fragmenting perhaps-- from it's "mission" of universal (and more or less "free") access to "content"--would not emerge as stable, universal, and open.

BTW - Rosetta stone/dead-language comment by kevinv appreciated. B-)

ASCII-UTF(n)-TIFF-PNG-PDF seem nice ... but that micro-etching on metal, whoa ... =B-o

The Rosetta Project <http://www.rosettaproject.org/live/search/admin/public_latestuploads>

Later_ that ole' humorless yet somehow fun lovin' reader named Greg

Please support:

Project Gutenberg <http://www.gutenberg.net/>

The Long Now Foundation <http://www.longnow.org/> <http://www.rosettaproject.org/>

The Internet Scout Project <http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/ScoutReport/Current/>

On 19 May 2005, at 19:43 , John W. Baxter wrote:
> On 5/18/05 11:34 PM, "Google Kreme" <gkremegmail.com> wrote:
>> This is a main reason that I no longer use any proprietary format for
>> written text. I switched from Word 5 ages ago and everything now is
>> plain old text. If it can't be plain old text, then it is HTML or
>> LaTeX -> PDF.
>
> openOffice.org uses XML files for everything. The format is
> published in
> great detail. Of course, as one of the 0.001% of computer users
> conversant
> with LaTeX, you don't need that.

Actually, what's interesting is that I am NOT conversant in LaTeX. I
was forced one day to take a document from Word that had been mangled
and format it in LateX. I learned pretty much the minimum I needed
in about an hour (spent more time downloading and installing TeX/
LaTeX and TeX SHop) and created a template that I just drop text
into. I do have to make a few changes and clean up the text (escape
the $ and &, change -'s to --'s, m-dashes to ---, and change quotes
to `` or '') but that's all very straight forward.

I end up with a pdf that takes nearly zero effort to produce and
looks better than just about anything else.

When I want to do something different, I type it into google. For
example, I wanted to quote a line from the new Star Wars movie in my
review, but didn't remember how (and \quote didn't do what I
expected} so I typed "latex quote" into google and got the answer
(\begin{quote}).

<http://2blog.kreme.com/blog/2974/Come_back_George_all_is_forgiven>

The entire process has been remarkably painless, and it is much
simpler than HTML, though admittedly, less forgiving of errors.

I'd be happy to share my template with anyone who asks.

--
"Yes," said the skull. "Quit while you're a head, that's what I say."