On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Teo Zenios wrote:
> Specifications are nice, but unless you get the people who still have the
> hardware and software to join in it will get nowhere.
Well, that's part of developing a specification, isn't it? Getting buy-in
is of course critical, which is why I'm going to approach this from the
standpoint of creating an internationally recognized standard that has an
RFC and everything.
> The problem is getting
> the people to follow the standards and image their disks, once the images
> have been collected you can do what you want with them and not worry about
> the platform they came from.
Once the standard is in place then people can choose to use it or not. If
not, that's their loss...their archives will have a lesser chance of being
propagated, unless they get a lot of other people to do whatever it is
they're doing.
I would hope that people would see the value in a standard like I am
proposing and use it. It's not my intention to have just another format
that people can choose. No, this will be THE standard.
> CAPS software uses an Amiga 1200 platform to
> get images from the original disks, Commodore 64 users can grab images from
> a 1541/1571 drive connected to a PC running DOS connected to the drive with
> a xe1541 cable and some software. As far as I know there is no hardware that
> can precisely read all of the different disk formats and sizes let alone
> deal with all copy protection methods (such as laser hole in the media
> itself). You still need the original hardware of the platform it ran on to
> get the images.. so you have to get the people of the different platforms
> behind you (good luck).
Exactly. And it's not a matter of luck, but rather a matter of survival.
Do you want the images of YOUR favorite platform to survive into the next
decade/century/millenium? Great, use the standard.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Wed Aug 11 2004 - 01:38:04 BST