Page 2 - Your first computer

But that was removable so 474KB times as many floppies as you had.

For those old machines they were built to the technology of the time and plastics were not that advanced back then.

I still have a bunch of old floppies on the shelves from various pre PC machines (read as non MSDOS or *nix systems) in 8", 5.25" hard sectored and 5.25" soft sectored. Wonder how I am ever going to read those non DOS formatted ones now, especialy the hard sectored ones?

How old are they? I'm guessing most are 25-30+ years old?

Spot on, I think some of the older ones are in the 30+ and some of the newer ones would be around the 25 year mark.

Good luck recovering them. I have some 5 1/4 inch floppies I'm trying to recover with cobble together hardware and it won't read them. I need to figure out how to get a Linux distro with DDrescue on it and mount the floppy drive and try recovering there. I think magnetic decay probably got the best of these though.

I have some of the files from these old floppies, nothing I can't do without. Only reason is to recover some old source code I wrote and some embedded firmware source and rom images that I worked on in my earlier days.

Yeah it's the same thing for me. This computer was a computer that was handed down in the family and ultimately ended up at my Grandparents. I remember playing it when I was younger. Plus it was from 1986 and had this interesting GUI menu driven OS. It would be fun to play around with that again.

So, do you have it and does it all work?

I have the computer still. The computer itself works (as of a few years ago, it's been in a closet) but the hard drive in it is dead (and has been for years). I do have like 60 5 1/4 inch floppies that are an exact backup of that hard drive but with a regular drive it doesn't seem to be readable for most of them. I'm hoping to rig something up so I can run DDrescue and hopefully recover everything and put it on a CD.

What computer is it?

It was a Northgate Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northgate_Computers It's based out of the Twin Cities, which is 160 miles from where I live.