bryan wann :: binary fury

[photos: flickr – 1995 Tape backup pulls]

Data has been recovered from my 1995 backup tapes! After badly mangling one of my three QIC-80 backup tapes trying to repair it to make it readable, I gave up before I screwed them up even more. Finally a couple of weeks ago I contacted Dmitry Brant, who has experience with tapes, if he still did tape data recovery and he said he does. A few days after sending the tapes to him, he got back to me “with good news and not so good.” One tape had a broken tension band but otherwise good; the second tape had some damage and wrinkles where it jammed in my drive, but was able to recover almost everything; and the third tape that I had wrenched on was too far damaged (the header was too wrinkled) to be salvageable but yet still managed to get a few megabytes off of it.

All in all there was around 250 MB of data recovered. It looks like there was a couple of full-ish backups of my old BBS and Windows 3.11 system, along with several partial or incremental backups throughout 1994 and 1995. I spent several days combing through all the files and it was like a nicely preserved little 1995 time capsule. Among the files were the contents of 27 floppies for the Slackware Linux distribution in 1994, such as AP (apps), N (TCP/IP network), X/XAP/XV (XFree86 implementation of X Windows). I distinctly remember moving these to tape because they took up a lot of my hard drive space at the time. It’s not clear which version of Slackware these came from, but definitely 1994. This was the first Linux distro I used, I seem to recall it was using a pre-1.0 kernel like maybe 0.96 or 1.2.18. Or maybe it was Slackware 1.2.18?

I was most excited about the BBS files after recently re-scratching that itch. It was all there, Wildcat! 4, my ANSI screens, cringy bulletins and welcome messages I wrote when I was 15, a couple hundred files in the files repo, door programs, log files, everything. There were a few dozen off-line QWK message files from a few bulletin boards I frequented, with my cringy messages. Half the stuff I wrote sounds like I was on a sugar rush from Mountain Dew, which I probably was. My graphics collection, which consisted of a few dozen .PCX and .GIF files. Unfortunately I didn’t seem to have a full working backup of Windows, I would have liked to see what I had there.

The BBS was named after the very small town in Oklahoma that I lived in, with much irony. It didn’t really have much of a theme or niche, other than trying to provide some sales and technical information for my gig building/selling/repairing computers. Despite being in the middle of nowhere I did have a dozen or so regular callers, mainly other BBS friends from around the country.

I don’t know what I was thinking with most of the door programs I was running, nobody wanted that stuff. Star Trek: TNG was all the rage then, on top of trivia doors I had a few oddball Enterprise and TNG graphics.

I was really into writing MS-DOS batch files because I was too poor to buy anyone’s utilities. One thing I had written was a batch file that figured out the file extension of uploads, .ZIP, .ARJ, .EXE, .LHZ, .Z, and then called the right archive tool to unpack and inspect it. (Still looks legit today). Another was this complicated batch file upload and virus scanner which shot raw ANSI to the caller as it progressed. I seem to recall it worked but it was brittle to work on. Normal people just bought somebody else’s program for $25 or whatever to do this for them.

My graphics collection wasn’t very large, and was mostly in the .PCX graphic format. I had just gotten a 1024 x 768 SVGA monitor and a Logitech handheld black and white scanner.

.GIF files were also new and novel to me, 800 x 600 pixels! 256 color! Photorealistic! They really made that Trident video card pop with what it could do. It’s funny to me because around that time .GIF files were relatively large, probably took thousands of dollars worth of scanner and PC to create them, probably came from CompuServe or a large membership BBS that cost $25/month and $2/hour to access, on top of the phone bill. (And they were all probably scans of copyrighted stuff which got a lot of boards in trouble). Now we regularly encourage taking and throwing away 12 megapixel HDR movies.

A single 256-color 640 x 480 image may have ran around 256 kilobytes in size. With a 14.4k modem, it downloaded about 1,440 characters per second, that image would have taken 177 seconds, or a hair under 3 minutes to download!

Also right around this exact same time (April 1995) the Oklahoma City bombing happened. I had a couple of .GIFs of the FBI sketches going around looking for suspects that I had downloaded a couple days after it happened.

There were a few apps still intact, like NCSA Mosaic and Netscape 1.0! Mosaic was the first browser I used, both of these were pre-HTTP/1.1 and pre-Javascript.

 

Overall I’m very excited about the haul. I had low expectations with the recovery effort, but thrilled data was salvaged from 29 years ago. I’ll probably go through and upload a lot of the original BBS file areas to my new BBS and otherwise make them accessible, as there’s quite a few vintage DOS/Windows 3.11 apps in there.