Backing up Twiggys

Backing up the software on Twiggy disks has regained interest recently with the discussion of ADT Pro for Lisa and the appearance of LisaPascal on Twiggies on eBay.

I've been working on a Basic Lisa Utility (BLU) for a year or so, which includes a function to read/write Twiggy disks and transfer the disk images via the serial port to a modern computer for backup (and restore). This uses xmodem via a terminal program on the modern computer (rather than separate host software as used by ADT Pro, for example).

Although there are other features I am still working on, the Twiggy support features of the latest beta version of BLU appear to be working well. This makes it possible to back-up Twiggies -- I don't know of another way.

I have found that most Twiggy disks (90%) have difficult (or impossible) to read sectors (which vary from drive to drive), so it may be prudent to make backups sooner rather than later.

I have been able to back-up the following:

  LOS 1.2 Disk 1/2
  LOS 1.2 Disk 2/2

  LisaWrite
  LisaCalc
  LisaGraph
  LisaProject
  LisaDraw
  LisaList

  Xenix 2.3 1/5 Boot Disk
  Xenix 2.3 2/5 Backup Boot Disk
  Xenix 2.3 3/5
  Xenix 2.3 4/5
  Xenix 2.3 5/5

I have also been able to de-serialize the 6 Lisa application Twiggies.

I have two requests:

1. Even if you don't have it -- if you know of other software on Twiggy disks, please post a note about it so that we know what we should be searching for.

The things that come to mind (that I do not have to back-up) are:

   LOS 1.0
   LisaTerminal
   LisaPascal

2) If you have any of the other software on Twiggy disks, please arrange to make a backup, either on your own Lisa 1 if you have one, or on a friend's Lisa 1 if you don't.

Even if you aren't sure if you want to share it with anyone else now, making a backup now is a good idea... otherwise it could easily be lost forever.

Because of bad sectors, it is important to have multiple images (from different copies of disks and from different drives) so that the bad sectors missing from one image can be replaced with good sectors from another image to make a complete one.

When more complete, BLU will be available for general distribution, and I will post a web-site where it can be downloaded. In the meantime, contact me directly if you want to back-up some Twiggies. Although it is worth it, Twiggy backup does require more effort than other floppy disks... it requires setting up the serial connection to another computer (serial cable and terminal software), and probably involves cleaning the heads of the Twiggy drives (perhaps multiple times, depending on the number of disks to backup).

Thanks for your cooperation!

James MacPhail
Sigma Seven Systems Ltd.

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