Squeak History... don't forget the Levco Prodigy! :-)

Jack Johnson fragment at nas.com
Tue Mar 18 16:33:50 UTC 2003


Duane Maxwell wrote:
> I moved recently, and I ran across the little stack of floppies for 
> Apple Smalltalk-80, though I think I may have been missing one.  I think 
> I may even have a Mac lying around that can still read 800K floppies - I 
> may even have a Mac SE in the garage that might run it.

Hi Duane/Everyone,

You might know all of this, but if you're looking for a good way to 
archive 800k floppies you come across (as the old timers start rooting 
through their closets), there are two (similar) methods I can suggest.

First, before you start, find a machine you know can read/write 800k 
floppies (actually, any Mac with an internal floppy drive should still 
be able to read 800k floppies, but not write them after MacOS 7.6 or 
so).  It'd be a shame to scrape a disk at this point.  Also, 
write-protect the disks so a newer MacOS won't rewrite the desktop 
folder on each one.

Then, use either SunTAR or Apple's Disk Copy (the newer version should 
still run on System 7.0 if needed) and make disk images of the floppies.

Apple's Disk Copy is nice because it's easy to restore the images to 
floppy on just about any Mac, and you can also mount the raw images to 
attempt installation.  If you choose this route, I suggest burning the 
images and utility to CD, so you can lend/save/etc. the images for 
future use while retaining the ability to install directly from CD and 
reproduce the floppies.

With SunTAR, if you read straight from the floppy device to a file 
you'll end up with a more standard disk image, like you would have if 
you could have used dd on *nix on a box that could have read the 800k 
disks (like a Mac running A/UX, NetBSD or Linux).  This can be handy 
because the resultant files are flat, with no resource fork, so they can 
be mailed or archived easily, mounted using the HFS filesystem on Linux 
or NetBSD (and probably OSX, though Disk Copy images would work there, 
too), and possibly run under a Mac emulator (ARDI's Executor or 
BasiliskII maybe).

Either way, the best thing you can do is get the data off the floppies 
as soon as possible.  Then, if your version of MacOS needs to rebuild 
the desktop on each volume (if they're System 6 disks), you can freely 
butcher a new floppy copy or writable Disk Copy image without worrying 
about any potential side-effects.

Good luck!

-Jack



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list