Robb Mann wrote:
Uhura's lost nudes?

More like Grace Lee Whitney... Lots of backstage stories about her.

Robb Mann wrote:
In can suck when you have media that's no longer supported -- anyone remember Zip Drives?

and tape drives for backups? i still have a few 8" floppies n core memory boards for a mini ohio scientific. mylar tape punch telletype?

Robb Mann wrote:
In can suck when you have media that's no longer supported -- anyone remember Zip Drives?

Remember? I still have ten Zip and two Jaz disks.... (and five LS120s too)

The F-Stop wrote:
special software???? really???

all they had to do was come to my house. i still have a couple dos machines running with 5.25" floppy drives!

I suspect that this was many years  pre DOS --
         -- probably an odd CP/M or UNIX variant with a non standard disk format to boost capacity beyond 160k/320k


  -- many tricks could have been used, including changing rotation speed and boosting the number of sectors to write more data on the outer tracks or writing data past the usual track limits


-- from an era when they sold punches so that you could cut a notch on the oposite side of the disk so that you could turn it over and write on the other side.

Michael Bots wrote:

I suspect that this was many years  pre DOS --
         -- probably an odd CP/M or UNIX variant with a non standard disk format to boost capacity beyond 160k/320k


  -- many tricks could have been used, including changing rotation speed and boosting the number of sectors to write more data on the outer tracks or writing data past the usual track limits


-- from an era when they sold punches so that you could cut a notch on the oposite side of the disk so that you could turn it over and write on the other side.

yea, wow - we're talking the 60's?  That's about 15 years prior to MS-DOS or CP/M.  Vintage floppy's could be 10 or 12 "hard sector'ed" - meaning they didn't have just one physical hole in the medium to sync up the sectors which would render them unreadable with any modern hardware.  It was probably a do-it-yourself kit computer.  Then, there's the formatting - probably a dozen or more different propriety formats and file systems.  On top of that, the magnetic media will have degraded and have started to drop a bit here and there.  No modern floppy drive would read it without hacking into the firmware.  They had a team working on it for a year - sounds about right.