Teledisk not working

From: Don Maslin <donm_at_cts.com>
Date: Thu Apr 5 16:45:48 2001

Jeffrey l Kaneko <jeff.kaneko_at_juno.com> wrote:
> "TeleDisk was developed to assist the U. S. Treasury Department
> in the processing of computer evidence tied to floppy diskettes."
>
> Does anybody know if this is *true*?! I always thought it was
> developed to distribute software via BBS's (and other electonic
> means).

To the best of my knowledge, it was developed as a commercial
product. There were a number of major computer companies - IBM
included - who used it for distributing reference disks and such.
In their case, instead of the downloader having a copy of TeleDisk,
he also d/l'd a copy of a companion program TeleGet which would
write the TeleDisk image to disk. TeleGet differed from TeleDisk
in that it had no read and save capability and, perhaps more
importantly, it was keyed to the originator's copy of TeleDisk and
would convert files from no other source.

However, IBM found that their users were a little on the incompetent
side and frequently could not cope with all this difficult
processing. They also developed internally the program LOADDSKF.EXE
which had the same customer problems. Sydex then developed a tailored
version of CopyQM for them that created self-extracting and writing
image files which is still in current use. You will find the Sydex
name in such IBM downloads.

                                                 - don
 
Received on Thu Apr 05 2001 - 16:45:48 BST