Story of VD0 - the invention of the recoverable ram disk

[pkivolowitz]

Yeah, I have a tape labeled "Whole Company 1/23/94" - it's an 8mm I think.

Interesting.

[Pyromania]

@pkivolowitz

If you give away source code we would be glad to host it for you on http://www.openvideotoaster.org.

[Vulture]

Interesting story!

[warpdesign]

But that's a story for another day

Looking forward to the next one then

Btw, would be interesting to have a look at that source code too

[pkivolowitz]

@pkivolowitz

If you give away source code we would be glad to host it for you on www.openvideotoaster.org.

I checked out eBay and there is no end to the Exabyte drives available there.

As an administrator here would you be willing to set up a little forum area and solicit a couple of experts who could give advice on how to do this? My concern is that I might get literally one and only one chance to stick the tape in a drive. I'd like to improve my chances of success on the very first try.

Questions I could use help in include:

• What Exabyte drive on eBay is likely to be able to read the 1994 era tape at all. Different drives used entirely different ways to organize the magnetic bits.
• What platform should I use and then what commands? For example, I imagine that something like the Unix command dd (if I remember right) just to load EVERYTHING off the tape without trying to interpret it and then once on disk try to figure out what was on it. Can I do with from Windows? If I use Linux, will the Firewire / SCSI converters work? Is there are different SCSI converter I should use?

Essentially this is a restoration job for a potentially historically important artifact. I'd like some help from experts so that the artifact isn't damaged needlessly.

[beller]

Perry!

Great to see you after all these years...it's been a long time since PLInk and GEnie!
Also good to see you're still in Wisconsin.  I ran across John Faust's card the other day....have you seen him lately?  

As someone said, starting to look like a reunion around here.  Welcome!

Bob Eller

[pkivolowitz]

Perry!

Great to see you after all these years...it's been a long time since PLInk and GEnie!
Also good to see you're still in Wisconsin.  I ran across John Faust's card the other day....have you seen him lately?  

As someone said, starting to look like a reunion around here.  Welcome!

Bob Eller

Hi Bob,

I haven't seen or heard from John in many years. I don't know if he is still in Wisconsin.

Let's see, there was:
- BIX - where the emoticon might have been invented. Joann Dow et al.
- The WELL - where the emoticon might have been invented. John Draper et al.
- PLINK - Harv's place.
- USENET - comp.sys.amiga.
- GEnie - I didn't go there much.
- COMPUSERVE - $$$

Where else am I missing?

[persia]

I think John Faust went on to make it big in real estate.  There really should be a "where are they now" set of links.

[beller]

Well good for John if he did make a real estate killing!  My bad, John's last name is Foust!  Sorry John!!

Perry, I think you've hit all the ones I remember.  BIX was mainly a developer's board as I remember.  I spent a couple of years with Harv at PLink and moved to GEnie and worked with Deb! before the WWW took away their reason to live and charge big bucks!

Where are they now indeed!   Sounds like a good addition...

Bob

[hardlink]

I checked out eBay and there is no end to the Exabyte drives available there.

I'm in Maryland and the first big Hamfest (Amateur Radio flea market) of the season is less than two weeks away. I always see Exabyte drives there, often by the boxful If the needed drive can be identified, I'd be glad to try and find one, test it if successful, and donate it to the cause. Maybe AdPro can get an update before the next 17 years!

[Bigbronc]

Hello, sorry to jump in on a reunion, nice stories. Where is this big Hamfest, I would love to go some place where some one can talk Amiga, most people don't know that there was a choice before. I am in Frederick Maryland and want to start a retro Amiga thing or something.

[Karlos]

Recoverable RAM disk was a smart idea. I use a ~30MB RAD as my OS (installed from a list of snapshots on cold boot).

[pkivolowitz]

I have purchased an Exabyte drive a bit more modern than the tapes hoping it will be backwards compatible.

I could still use some experts to help me make sure I read the tape in one try.

[hardlink]

I have purchased an Exabyte drive a bit more modern than the tapes hoping it will be backwards compatible.

I could still use some experts to help me make sure I read the tape in one try.

What is printed on the tape cartridges?
Not an expert, but I have used (and still have to use) quite a few different Exabyte drives over the years.

[pkivolowitz]

What is printed on the tape cartridges?
Not an expert, but I have used (and still have to use) quite a few different Exabyte drives over the years.

The tape is an 8mm written on an Exabyte drive in 1994. It is probably a 2 or 4 GB tape at most. It would likely have been written on an A4000 running Unix using tar.

I also have some 4mm DATs from roughly the same era but I'll get to those later.

My desire to read the tape only once is driven by experience with very old tapes. The become brittle and will often fly off their spindles.

My hope is to (using a Windows machine) slurp up all data in one or more partitions / segments (forget what they're called) into individual files and then figure out how to parse the files.

I have a Linux machine as well but it is used as a production server and do not want to take it down for SCSI controller installation.

From early memory, a Unix "dd" command could be used to suck the data off the tape without parsing it. Is there something like that for Windows tape (which I have never used)?

Once the bytes are on the Windows machine I can transfer to the Linux server and untar them there - shouldn't be a problem, right?

[klx300r]

awesome story! thanks for coming back to the Amiga :-)