Operation BitSave

Entry posted by Flack April 10, 2008

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I spent most (all) of my evening working on my PC software archiving project. As I mentioned yesterday, this project began after noticing that many of my older CDs have started to disintegrate. If I'm reburning everything, I might as well organize it all while I'm at it. To kick off the project I copied every CD-R I've ever burned back to my laptop's hard drive. Now, I'm relabelling and reorganizing things before eventually committing them back to some sort of media, be it DVD, hard drive, or most likely, both.

My oldest "warez" CDs date back to 1995; that was the year we got our first CD-Rom burner at work. The burner burned only at 1x, meaning each CD took approximately 75 minutes to burn. The best deal we found at the time for blank CDs was 10 for $100, plus shipping. Jeff, Johnny and I split the first 10 pack. The burner was external, connected via a parallel port, and contained its own hard drive. To burn a CD, first your data had to be copied to the unit's internal hard drive, after which it was burned to a CD. The whole process took hours to complete -- then again, at $10 a CD, I wasn't in any hurry to "burn" through all my media. This was back in the day when you didn't dare open a program or tax your computer in any way while you were burning. The slightest hiccup could cause your CD to fail, taking your ten bucks with it in the process.

In the mid-90s, CDs were seen as an inexpensive way to expand your storage capacity, particularly for sysops. When I burned my first CD-Rom I was running my BBS off of a 540 meg hard drive -- that's smaller than one CD-Rom! By moving all my downloads to a CD, I could free up tons of hard drive space for more uploads. There were lots of games less than a meg in size back then, so 540 megs of drive space was plenty of room! A few months after I started burning CDs I invested in an external six disc CD-Rom changer. This thing was the size of a shoebox and made a distinctive loud "ka-CHUNK" sound it made every time it swapped CDs around. I can remember being woken up many times by that thing as users would log on to my BBS in the middle of the night, scanning for new CDs. ka-Chunk. ka-Chunk. ka-Chunk ...

Scanning through old CDs is kind of funny. Many of the early programs I've been sorting say "for Windows" after the filenames. For years all programs were written for DOS, so for a couple of years everyone had to append "for DOS" or "for Windows" on to the end of their games and applications. Out of curiousity's sake I sat down earlier and tried to get some of the old DOS and Windows programs to run. Very few ran natively in XP. The ones that did had problems recognizing modern hardware (ie: soundcards). DosBox did a really good job; in it I was able to play most any game I tried. What didn't seem to work were many of the old demos. I fiddled with DosBox for quite some time but couldn't get some of the quirky EMS/XMS-dependent demos to run, even with those settings enabled in the configuration. Maybe another night. For the most part, I didn't even try most of the applications. I have dozens upon dozens of DOS-based file and memory managers. Interesting to look at, but useless for the most part.

One of the biggest kicks I got was browsing my old BBS files again. By using the Windows version of ACiD View (Sorry, RaD Man) I was able to view all of my BBS's old ANSI files and convert them to PNG files (which I then converted to JPG). You don't know the memories these old logos brought back.

One of many Gas Chamber logos.

One of many Soulz at Zero logos.

One of many TBH405 logos.

I'm going to continue this project until it's finished. If you wonder why I would waste my time archiving and organizing old bits of data that no one else on Earth could possibly care about ... well, I wish I had an answer for you. It's crazy. I know it's crazy. It's crazy to the point where, when I'm working on it, I think to myself, "Jesus, I'm crazy." And yet, I can't rest until it's done. The thought of disorganized data haunts me. If accepting is the first step then I'm ready for step two. If I stop and think about it too hard I'm afraid I'll quit, and I have way too many files depending on me for that to happen. I don't exactly know why I do what I do. Sometimes I wish I could quit, but I have promises to keep.

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

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potatohead 1,603

Posted April 13, 2008

Hey, that's cool.

Having lost some archives to bit rot, I can totally understand. Every so often, it's good to look back at the pixels and bits from the past.

I suspect we do this for the same reason people keep photos.

For just a moment, you can go back there and remember and that's worth something --even if it's only perspective!

Lost a nice chunk of my SGI archives to disks that won't spin up any more. Maybe I'll do some extreme stuff one day, but right now is not that day. Lost another chunk to a move, and another to cheap ass CD-R media that rotted in about 5 (freaking 5!!!) years.

Have fun man. Snag some good thoughts and memories along the way. Maybe you have something nobody else does and it will matter someday.