Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks
When was the last time you saw a working CPM machine (not in a museum)?
Did it have 8" floppies or 5.25" floppies?
I would be surprised if data was recoverable without extraordinary (expensive) means.
Old Early floppies tend to jam in their sleeves. If it does, the disk is now toast 
Data print through/bleed-over is another lurker.
Not saying ALL will fail. I have many open reel tapes (some Quad). The Mylar ones play nicely, the acetate ones  ) Good quality media, treated nice can survive. |
Last time I saw a working CP/M machine was slightly more than 25 years ago. It was a four-user time-shared system, located in my own office at work, and I used it daily. However it was listed in inventory as "surplus scrap" and TPTB took it away to the recyclers one day.
Didn't have floppies at all -- 5 MB hard disk was its only storage!
Floppies, both 8-inch and 5-inch, tended to vary widely in quality. Those from 3M had a tendency to lose their oxide coating within weeks. CDC, however, knew how to make them. I still have several file boxes of the 5-inch variety, maybe 500 platters in all, and only a couple of years ago gave away a pair of quad-density (double-sided, double-density on each side) full-height drives that gave me more than a megabyte of storage on my TRS-80 Mod 4 back in the day. However it's been years since I attempted to recover data from any of the disks.
Jerry was quite active on CompuServe back in the 80s, and probably does have copies of his original manuscripts (unless mechanical issues have destroyed the discs over time) but in those days, there were many steps between the original script and the printed page, each step adding additional value. The script had to be first edited, then proofed. Next, it required transfer to the Quark system, which became the standard for professional typesetting software, and after a fresh round of proofing, was ready to go to the presses.
I had personal experience of this with one book on which Ralf Brown and I collaborated in the early-90s. It was so highly technical that Ralf and I insisted on bypassing the entire complicated process, and having the final plates created directly from our submitted WinWord manuscript, which we had carefully proofed.
The first edition was in many ways a minor disaster, although it got good reviews and sold well enough to encourage A-W to do a second edition later. I had been called out of town at a critical point, leaving Ralf to do the final update of one area -- and not being as familiar with WinWord as I had become at that point, he forgot to insert a critical closing command with the result that one page turned into a jumbled mass of characters.
All of which I offer as good reason why Dr. Pournelle would request copies of the printed versions, rather than relying on any saved copies of original manuscripts.
It's really been a wild ride, watching how far publishing has advanced in the past 65 years!