desktop power supply

Author	Message
Phil23 Guru Joined: 27/03/2016 Location: Australia Posts: 1667	Posted: 09:47pm 12 Jun 2018         Warpspeed said   I must have thrown away about half a dozen of those big floppy drives over the years, but still have some very old DOS programs here I would like to play with again. Two old Dos Boxes sitting in the shed, Both IBM's an XT & an AT. When you start to think about it, there's a few hurdles to overcome to extract the data from the floppies. Can't just wack them on a USB, Lol. Telnet & FTP came to mind, but quickly realised there's no network interface. Probably just an RS-232 & Centronics ports. Reminds me of the few occasions I needed to extract inventory & accounts data from a THEOS & a CPM system. Entire process involved running a multitude of "Printed" reports with a Centronics to RS-232 Converter. That data stream was piped into my then Win95 laptop & captured with "Supercom"; bit of a Teraterm relation. Then it was off to scripts & queries in MS Access to create some DB's, then a few more queries to export the whole lot to CSV ready for loading on the new system. Vaguely recall the process taking several weeks of development & testing before the live changeover. Something like 5pm to late on-site extracting data, before finally having the CSV's all imported at 3am in the morning. It is interesting to think how much data we have stored these days that is less than simple to access... Like the 4000+ feet of Super & Standard 8 movie film sitting on a shelf in my office. (That's about 5 hours worth). Cheers Phil.