On 1/19/2023 3:38 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
On Jan 19, 2023, at 4:31 PM, rar--- via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
Museum Staff Helps Exonerate David Veney
January 19, 2023, Hunt Valley, MD — Staff members of the System Source Computer
Museum recently completed a project that helped exonerate David Veney, wrongly
convicted of rape in 1997. In 2005, after Mr. Veney sought a new trial, the
state found irregularities in the prosecution, released Mr. Veney from prison,
and declined to re-prosecute. ...
Wow. That is a marvelous story.
Just one comment: using the GreaseWeazle makes sense here, but other options
would include seeking out the help of the community. For example, 5.25 inch
floppy drives are widely available, and reading RX50 format on an ordinary
drive in Linux is a trivial exercise. Similarly, feeding the recovered device
image to a SIMH instance would be easy enough. The tricky task of translating
the application data to readable text still remains in any of those approaches,
of course.
paul
I see it as seeking out the community. Your point probably is about
casting a wider net to individuals, but I think asking an organization
to help creates more comfort, especially if you're talking about
irreplaceable data like this. Given the age of the disk and the
expectation for errors, even if a single community member had been
asked, I doubt they would try to read it from Linux or similar. It's an
option, yes, but not a recommended one, since you might have limited
reads available, and a flux read gives you maximum data with minimum effort.
Your SIMH thought makes a ton of sense. Not knowing the effort here, I
would assume once the flux image was available and with the lack of SW
to do much with the data available anyway, treating it like a raw data
dump was probably the most expedient option to get to the end goal.
Jim
--
Jim Brain
br...@jbrain.com
www.jbrain.com
