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PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2020 1:03 pm 
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This will be one of the few times I link off site.
I’m rebooting an old project of mine from many years ago.
History of A/V
Let me point out a few things though.
This is an OLD project. I started this when the internet wasn’t yet the World Wide Web. Scouring BBSs and Usenet.
This has been rebooted twice. Once in the early web years and again at the early birth of Wikis.
I think you can really tell the age of the project from the snail.mail address. Does anyone remember that service?
Nothing is properly referenced. Some info is inaccurate. Most of this is from my own personal experience.

So, why here?
The photos here for scrap bring up one of the largest collections of whoa and wth tech on the internet. Looking for archaic tech on bing and google brings up boardsort quite often.
There’s a big user base here of actual techs. People who know stuff.
So maybe some blanks can be filled in.
Obviously it starts much later whith the BPR Than data storage did. That was the oldest recorded tech I could find in the early 90s and late 80s when I started the project. And much has happened since I last stopped! 1080P? Funny.

Why now?
Why not. Most of the country is still stay at home. I had forgotten about the project until I stumbled across it looking for info on a board posted here a few days back. Finding I had covered and forgotten about my own research!

The owner/admin over there had set up the wiki and made this post the first post. The wiki and the project never really caught on then.
And while I forgot about that project my interest (and collecting) never stopped.
So much has changed in 30+ years. We, as a collective mind, may finally be able to finish this to some degree.

Goals?
For now... update, reference, and flush out what is there.
Add more. Much more. More text, more info, more formats.
Ultimately? Publish. Online and offline. The two licences I hold most dear are IDGAF and DWYW. This isn’t about money. It’s about knowledge.

You?
Today. For the moment: I want to get this out there again. Get some ideas. Is this even worthwhile? Should I keep this going? Or should I just let it die. And move on.
Let me know what you all think.

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PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2020 7:27 am 

Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 3:42 pm
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Location: Troy, NY
Lost, I didn't see this until about an hour ago. I almost never go through this section of the forum. So, sorry for the delay.
I didn't read every word, I'll go back through when I have some more time/coffee.
My initial thoughts:
-Although the blurbs may be from your own experiences and written as such, they are more than likely many other peoples experiences as well. I had a sense of serious nostalgia when reading about formats from my youth (beta, floptical disks, etc) I think that is the point here. The outline of the histories of the medias represented here I think is pretty on point and should be preserved, or otherwise forgotten.
- To wit, imagine the younger users on here that have never seen a 5.25" floppy or know what a phonograph is. I think that would be invaluable to them, and to the rest of us that like weird stuff in general. Not just on this site, but out in the world as well.

I think this should stick around. It'll be something that will have to be constantly updated, and to refine what is there will take time, but the juice is worth the squeeze, in my opinion.


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PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2020 7:56 am 

Joined: Tue Aug 08, 2017 3:28 pm
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Sounds noteworthy and fun. Although not as large a propeller head like others on this board, I can still CLOAD with the best of them - I'd love to walk down this road again.


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PostPosted: Mon Jul 13, 2020 2:58 pm 
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5.25?
I still have 8” disks and a drive!

Agin this is OLD. I started it on a parts BBS for importing foreign games. More as a quick reference for track pitch and timings on floppies. Sadly that aspect is lost to history. Completely it appears.
When I moved to compuserve (q-link/quest) this moved to a CIS.inf. group. Somewhere in the early 90s I moved it to AOL in the Videogames>resources forum where I was a guide. Eventually it ended up as a post on DD who’s web admin was kind enough to move it to it’s own subnet.
Things were added and lost over the years.
I know the timings tables were lost when I went to AOL because I did them in ASCII ALT format. They didn’t transfer to TLF and looked like crap so I pulled it to redo it. Never got around to it and lost the disk along the way. I only remember it was a 3mb table of raw ASCII at a time when 1meg floppy disks were still expensive. It was the start of my programming in modifying kZip to compress it it under 700k using a larger 256 character database dictionary rather than the hex two character paired one in LZ.
And to gloat, that dictionary method is still available, uselessly, in LibComASC. The text compression library. ;)

I Would like to make this useful and eventually move it to a WikiMedia base along the way.

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 16, 2020 8:48 am 

Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2014 3:42 pm
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Location: Troy, NY
LOL
Remember Bernoulli boxes? I have three of them, two are brand new and unopened from the 80's. I have some (I think?) 20MB discs that are about the size of a legal pad that this thing uses. And that was "high capacity" then. Interesting principle. Should have taken off, but it probably ruffled a few feathers of those in the industry at large.


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PostPosted: Thu Jul 16, 2020 11:29 am 
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That’s a kool one. I forgot about them.

They’re not actually floppy disks but hard drive cartridges. A modernised version of the removable drum hard drives.
Reliable as anything historically.
If you kept the drive clean with the then $100 cleaning and alignment cartridge they should still work today!

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PostPosted: Thu Jul 16, 2020 11:43 am 
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Moving along.
I have a blank page now! :)

I only ask you give me a few days to get the old text moved before you sign up and edit it.
fandom page

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PostPosted: Thu Aug 13, 2020 10:40 am 
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lostinlodos wrote:
Moving along.
I have a blank page now! :)

I only ask you give me a few days to get the old text moved before you sign up and edit it.
fandom page

thats very trusting,i so badly want to add a bunch of non related stuff but i wont for now ..


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PostPosted: Thu Aug 13, 2020 1:40 pm 
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It’s a wiki. That’s what wikis are: community interaction.
I’m... still learning.
But progress is being made. I have a main page (I think) now and colours (I think).
Lol

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PostPosted: Sat Sep 12, 2020 10:36 am 

Joined: Wed Mar 04, 2020 5:26 pm
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Hey lost one of my favorite things to hang onto is old radios stereos receivers and the like. I actually have a large collection of photo facts maybe we could figuare out a way to scan them? They are old and in the original binders.


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