| Re: Jordan mechner's blog post on finding and posting the Prince [message #882 is a reply to message #843] |
Tue, 01 May 2012 16:59  |
Trevor
Messages: 23
Registered: January 2012
Karma:
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Junior Member |
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From Newsgroup: comp.sys.atari.8bit
I've found it interesting that I can still access data from a 30 year
old 5.25" floppy, but when I try to read a 10 year old CDR it doesn't work.
- Trevor
On 4/18/2012 1:45 PM, Bill Kendrick wrote:
> Prince of Persia Source Code -- Posted!
> http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/04/source/
>
> "Let me begin to count the ways I've been lucky with this: The box
> was found. The disks were intact. Prince of Persia and I happened to
> have a high enough public profile that people of Jason and Tony's
> caliber (and dozens of others who contributed their expertise via IRC,
> skype and twitter from around the world) cared.
>
> "In the bigger picture, our timing was lucky. The 1980s and the
> Apple II are long enough ago to be of historical interest, yet recent
> enough that the people who put the data on the disks are still with
> us, and young enough to kind of remember how we did it. Roland
> Gustafsson, author of the special 18-sector RWTS routines that had
> made our disks super-efficient in 1988 (and unreadable to anyone but
> us), was able to get on IRC in 2012 and explain what he'd done to
> Discferret kids who weren't born then.
>
> "For all these lucky reasons, our archaeological expedition was
> crowned with success.
>
> "From a preservationist point of view, the POP source code slipped
> through a window that is rapidly closing. Anyone who turns up a 1980s
> disk archive 20 or 30 years from now may be out of luck. Even if
> it's something valuable that the world really cares about and is
> willing to invest time and money into extracting, it will probably be
> too late."
>
>
> *Stares at my own collection of 5.25" floppies*
>
> Also, thanks to folks like Kevin Savetz (AtariArchives.org&
> Classic Computer Magazine Archive) and Peter Brantley,
> et al (Internet Archive) who have been trying to archive great
> stuff all along! :)
>
>
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