I moved from Amiga to PC somewhat gradually starting probably late 1995. I actually got my first experience of Linux from a very early edition of Linux Unleashed from SAMS Publishing as myself and a friend assembled our PCs from components. I don’t actually know if it was the first or second edition of the book, so don’t know if it was Slackware 2.2 or 3.0 but I briefly had Linux running on his machine mid-build before I even had mine finished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the last things I did on my A1200 (apparently in 1997) was link it up to my 100 MHz 486 DX4 and use a not exactly well known tool included with Workbench 3.0 called BRU (Backup and Restore Utility) to create a backup. It was a sense of some amusement that my 14 MHz 68EC020 Amiga often had to wait for the PC running just MS-DOS to catch up during file transfers of all types back then, not just multi-megabyte BRU backups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To make a long story, well, slightly less long, I’ve known these BRU archives were on a couple of CD-Rs, along with some Windows 9x ERA PC stuff, but I’ve not even seen to CD-R discs around for at at least 5 years, possibly closer to 10, and yesterday I found them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wasted no time in loading up the CD-Rs to copy and was amazed that almost every file read. Sadly some folders of PC files look like they didn’t write to CD properly (files the correct size but completely ’empty’ – all null bytes) but the Amiga BRU files were intact and better still only half a dozen files within the BRU archives gave errors or warnings during extraction…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well yes, of course I extracted them! Twice actually. Once to a new single partition “HDF” within a WinUAE environment, and then more interestingly I made a second new HDF, partitioning it to a similar layout to my final A1200 hard drive (I upgraded to from roughly 128 MB to roughly 300 MB at some point)- making a new WinUAE configuration and booting from a restored drive was too tempting to resist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well I got a weird alert about inserting an original floppy for some disk compression software (one partition was “transparently compressed” on the original machine) presumably as it didn’t see a some marker in the “Rigid Disk Block” area, and for some reason the display settings were a bit strange (probably down to problems I was seeing with my A1200 memory expansion at the time) but it was a real thrill exploring the contents of my old A1200 system, finding files I haven’t seen in over two decades!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So many memories, and so many previously lost source code files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was however a bit odd going back to a Kickstart and Workbench 3.0 system having been working with the Hyperion 3.2 release in recent months (must try the 3.2.1 update soon).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hopefully early 2022 will see this blog “catch up” with my experiments, as in reality in the past week or two I’ve actually started experimenting with and partially debugging code that I stopped working on in March 1995 (such a buzz seeing the original dates on files, even if directories all show 2021). With this discovery I can actually made any accompanying downloads for the next few already drafted posts a little more authentic. Watch this space!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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