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).
ObAOL: Me Too. Seriously, I thought the idea was to be able to copy a
diskette to an image file that could be transferred via other means
and then copied back to a diskette for use at the receiving end. The
image file was mostly opaque to the user(s). I'm not sure how this
helps the Treasury Department, unless they're using it to ship
evidence-diskette images back to an FBI agent in the J. Edgar Hoover
building who knows how to work the FBI's one copy of XenoCopy to go
trawling through the reconstitued diskette for files.
I have dim memories from Lasnerian times of netnews articles posted by
and in response to people trying to exchange RX50 images via Teledisk;
the observation made was that doing this required certain versions of
Teledisk and/or certain types of floppy drives.
And I think that all this angst is amusing in light of today's
"Rhymes With Orange" comic strip.
If you want to see the strip in your gooey webulator, wait two weeks,
it'll be up at <
http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/>. Those of us who
get it with our newspaper's comics page can have immediate
gratification.
Oh, all right, I'll spoil it. The punch line is "Except for
computers, which no longer read floppy disks." Perhaps the author is
one of those people who thinks "computer" means "Macintosh, late
model".
-Frank McConnell
Received on Thu Apr 05 2001 - 11:05:02 BST