My view on this is not the fact that we are in able to keep the HARDWARE functioning. We can keep that maintained for 10000 years. The magnetic media utilized by the disk drives have been reaching their end of life, NOS boxes have been opened, used, and found to be damaging to the hardware as the media is sloughing or flaking off the Mylar of the disk itself. So the question becomes restoration vs visual preservation while not losing logical functionality. On Tuesday, December 29, 2015, Douglas Crawford via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Our exhibit next time won't have the 1541 drives, but will use uIEC instead
to reduce power and troubleshooting.
My $.02 Aw, lets be careful about that. I like the convenience of the SD card file systems and they have their place, but working disk drives are important to the demoing history. This was clear to me at NY Maker, and also was commented to me by several individuals at VCFE. If we can't keep disk drives going, we might as well admit failure on the whole restoration scene.
BTW: I think the IBM PC boot drive is bad too or the DOS floppy in the drive is bad. It boots right into ROM basic.
DC
-- Normal Person: Hey, it seems that you know a lot. Geek: To be honest, it's due to all the surfing I do. Normal Person: So you go surfing? Normal Person: But I don't think that has anything to do with knowing a lot... Geek: I think that's wrong on a fundamental level. Normal Person: Huh? Huh? What?