[rescue] What to do with AT&T 3b2 disk images?

[Ahmed Ewing]

On 9/13/07, Geoffrey S. Mendelson <gsm at mendelson.com> wrote:
> A while back I posted a question about some 3b2 disk images I had and
> did not know what to do with. For health reasons, I had to put it aside.
>
> Here's my situation. Around 1994 I had an AT&T 3b2. With it I had a set
> of manuals and a System V Release 3.2 UNIX floppies. The floppies were
> 80 track 720k 5 1/4 diskettes. I was able to copy them with a program
> called Teledisk. I gave away the 3b2's when I moved here in 1996, and the
> person who took them soon after became ill and was unable to do anything
> with them.
>
> I advertised them free for the pickup for him before he died, but I have
> no idea if they were picked up or not. If they were not, I'm sure his widow
> threw them out. :-(
>
> When I psoted here last about them several people suggested that I try
> a program called imagedisk. It trys to read teledisk images and rewrite them
> in it's own format. Teledisk was shareware and is long gone. It is rumored to
> only work properly on very old PC's, which I don't have.
>
I must have missed the original post to which you're referring, but I
know I have a recent enough copy of Teledisk to work with a
proprietary external floppy drive* on a Dell Latitude C-Series laptop
running XP on a P4 processor. I was trying to recreate MS-DOS 6.22
from Teledisk images, and it worked great with Teledisk 2.15 (no dice
with earlier releases which didn't seem to recognize the drive at
all). As long as you still have a 5 1/4" drive capable of writing the
images, I'd think it should work fine.

Of course, if the conversions work then it's all for the better, being
an open format and all. But if you do find a 3b2 for testing, perhaps
it's worth recreating from the original images as well to avoid any
errors in translation. Either way, I'd be interested in a copy of
those TD0s for my personal collection :-)

Hope that helps,

-A

* It's actually an internal floppy drive module, but you can use a
special cable to hang it externally off the docking station port to
free up an internal bay for another battery or optical / ZIP drive...
its about as oddball as modern floppy hardware gets. I was actually
kinda shocked when it did work, but at the time it was the only floppy
drive in my home.