Save the Yestertech

Long ago, I grew up like lots of geeks currently in their mid-30’s: with an Apple and a Commodore. Unlike a lot of geeks, I had an Apple IIgs and a Commodore SX-64. Still have the SX-64, actually (and it’s for sale).

I used to spend the requisite (inordinate) amount of time playing games or writing little programs in Basic with my best friend. And I accumulated quite a stack of 5.25” floppy disks for my trouble.

Fast forward to nowadays. The SX-64 is sitting lonely in my office. I have replaced its magnificence with an emulator, Power64. Many of my personal disks, though, remain out of reach. Oh, I know there are schematics online, and even little dangly bits you can buy for exhorbitant prices that let you attach your 1541 to a PC’s parallel port. You can probably even get a parallel-to-USB adapter and maybe even get them to a Mac. But I don’t have a 1541, so the disks also just sit here, lonely. When I scanned them in on a whim, it occurred to me that the resulting image files were larger than the disks they were pictures of. Which led me to this fun thought: steganographically embed the contents of the disk image into the actual image of the disk. Make it a true disk image.

We need a service, not unlike the CDs-to-iPod ripping or photos-to-CD scanning: You send your old floppies to them, and they’ve got all the yestertech to deal with migration, and they send you back emulator-compatible disk images, steganographically embedded into scanned pictures of the actual disk. Somebody get on that quick, because I don’t have the time.

Update: Dave Dribin points me at RetroFloppy, whose tagline “Don’t let your old data die.” could have been the title of this post.