I'd look around for an external floppy drive, plug it into a modern machine,
download knoppix, boot that and it will read the disk.
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 04:10:22PM -0700, Mary Ann Horton Gmail wrote:
Hunting around through my ancient stuff today, I ran
across a 5.25" floppy
drive labeled as having old Usenet maps. These may have historical interest.
First off, I don't recognize the handwriting on the disk. It's not mine.
Does anyone recognize it? (pic attached)
I dug out my AT&T 6300 (XT clone) from the garage and booted it up. The
floppy reads just fine. It has files with .MAP extension, which are ASCII
Usenet maps from 1980 to 1984, and some .BBM files which are ASCII Usenet
backbone maps up to 1987.
There is also a file whose extension is .GRF from 1983 which claims to be a
graphical Usenet map.?? Does anyone have any idea what GRF is or what this
map might be? I recall Brian Reid having a plotter-based Usenet geographic
map in 84 or 85.
I'd like to copy these files off for posterity. They read on DOS just fine.
Is there a current best practice for copying off files? I would have guessed
I'd need a to use the serial port, but my old PC has DOS 2.11 (not much
serial copying software on it) and I don't have anything live with a serial
port anymore. And it might not help with the GRF file.
I took some photos of the screen with the earliest maps (the ones that fit
on one screen.) So it's an option to type things in, at least for the early
ASCII ones.
Thanks,
?????? Mary Ann
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Larry McVoy lm at
mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm