[rescue] FTP site for archive of _all_ old platforms on

[Scott Quinn]

Quoth Shel:

> As a way of promoting contributions, one thing you might consider is 
> having
> software and instructions for cloning floppies, making disk images from
> floppies, etc.  I have a number of old OSes on various kinds of 
> floppies,
> and the hardware to read those floppies.  I'm sure I'm not alone in my
> having all sorts of old stuff of which I cannot make transmitable 
> images.

Dave Dunfield's ImageDisk is very good at this
(http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/img/)

Dave is very active in the hobby of maintaining and repairing old 
machines, and ImageDisk uses a open format and has source available so 
it will be around for a long time.

For tapes, there's always tapeutils 
(http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/software/tapeutils/)
and the old standby dd. I have a hacked-together script to automate 
working with multipart dd
images. When archiving tapes, I try to get one image (either dd or 
tapeutil) and, if possible, extracted files in a format that doesn't 
require tapes to access (distcp them off of SGI inst-tapes, rbak from 
Apollo tapes/wbak to files, etc.) Sometimes this isn't needed (tar, 
cpio, Sun-install tapes).

CD-ROMs can have dd-images made, and paper tape also has various 
archiving systems (look at the PDP-8 and -11 emulator pages).