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Discussion Sentiment

50% Positive

Analyzed from 230 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#drives#older#things#real#tapes#data#emulation#cost#drive#working

Discussion (8 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

ggm•about 1 hour ago
I'd be interested in access to real drives capable of reading real tapes, to get archival data off my tapes. And, DAT format.

If the emulation aides in FPGA or small device coding to make modern interface bindings to older devices and so drops the entry cost to get an older SCSI or firewire drive working, I'd be delighted.

If this is emulation of the command set aimed at "driving" a software emulated tape drive, It's for another purpose. It won't help me recover old media.

(cheapskate: there are competent, expensive companies which specialise in this kind of data recovery. The problem is cost/benefit, not actual capability at any price)

sixothree•23 minutes ago
Doesn't this bring us closer to that?
ggm•17 minutes ago
That's certainly the hope!
GalaxyNova•about 2 hours ago
I think LLMs go against the retrocomputing ethos
a1o•about 1 hour ago
It removes the fun of figuring things out by yourself and the learning how to learn things. Also the lower complexity these systems usually have vs what we use today.

I don’t see the appeal either, but perhaps the person using takes something else from their retrocomputing use.

Daishiman•about 1 hour ago
Some of us care a bit more about having historically relevant content be accessible. I care very little about the reverse engineering aspect.
a1o•30 minutes ago
Yes, I understand, as perhaps someone who has a museum and has to keep things working with very little resources, and I imagine there are many more reasons. Different people may have the same hobbies on the surface for different reasons and so on.
hagbard_c•about 1 hour ago
Then so do emulators, flash drives instead of 1541's, etc. Nobody forces you to use generative models to get older hardware to do its thing, you're still free to try to get the actual hardware to run, free to build interfaces to get QIC drives connected to whatever you want them connected to, etc.