A few weeks ago I dug out my old Tandy Color Computer 3 and began the project of archiving all my old floppy disks to disk image files. I am using Darren Atkinson’s CoCoSDC interface for this project, and it has been an amazing pleasure to work with so far.

I have backed up probably well over 300 Disk BASIC floppy disks, and have hundreds more OS-9 disks to get to next. I am also dealing with files that are on Compact Flash cards plugged in to the Cloud-9 SuperIDE interface (I never bothered with a physical IDE drive by the time I got that interface in 2004), and even some on my old SyQuest EZ135 SCSI drive using a KenTon SCSI interface.

This mixture of controllers, device drivers and “hard drives” has given me much time to revisit how things worked back then. Right now, I have a fresh 128MB .dsk image on an SD card in my CoCoSDC and I am backing up an EZ135 SCSI disk to it. It is taking hours (and just finished as I type this), but the end result is an exact clone sector-by-sector, including any deleted files I may want to peek at again. (It would probably have been much faster just to use a file copy tool, like “arc”, and go “arc -am /h0 /sd1”).

Along the way, I have discovered programs I had forgotten writing. For instance, in my pre-OS-9 days, I knew I had written a MIDI librarian program for the Kawai K1 synthesizer. It was sold by Rulaford Research:

…but I had forgotten I wrote a Layaway program for an East Texas furniture store:

During my disk-cavations, I unearthed many more projects I had forgotten about. Some were completed and deployed (freeware tools, music demos, utilities), and others were work-in-progress items.

And so much more! I have also found old documentation to the Sub-Etha products, and discovered I wrote an MM/1 program I had completely forgotten about – MegaBanners (an updated MiniBanners, but using Joel Hegberg’s high-resolution font engine). Wild.

I guess since most of this was twenty years ago, and has been packed away since then, I can be forgiven for my faulty memories. It sure has been fun rediscovering things.

After a few more weeks, I expect to have all of my old floppies and hard drives archived to the CoCoSDC. After that, a huge project begins: sorting and organizing everything.

Once I get to this point, I plan to put together some .dsk images of the old Sub-Etha Software items for folks to check out. They will be made available as shareware with the hope of making a few dollars. We’ll see if that works in 2015.

More to come…