Re: Tips for making Twiggy images

Hi all,

Here's an update on the Pascal Workshop 1.0.

I had a chance to open up the sealed Workshop box containing the Workshop twiggies today, and results are mixed.

Twiggies 1 and 2 (of 3) appear to be in fine shape, with no signs of oxide dust on the disk surface. Disk 3 shows considerable dust at the sites of the R/W head apertures and perhaps around the spindle hole as well. It seems likely that Disk 3 was not made the same way (or perhaps by the same company) as disks 1 and 2; those disks have a white ring around the spindle hole, while disk 3 does not. Perhaps the media formula was different, too.

The product identification number on the Disk 3 label has a little sticker covering the A in 6##-####-A with a tiny letter B, suggesting that Disk 3 may represent an amendment to the Workshop 1.0 release disk set---perhaps Apple discovered that it needed to throw away all of the -A disks and replace them with -B disks made later. This theory would help explain why Disk 3 seems to be of different manufacture than Disks 1 and 2.

Anyway, I went ahead and made images of Disks 1 and 2 using BLU. Disk 3 will have to wait until I feel more confident about cleaning off the dust. Here are the .dc42 files:

Disk
1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0_fWRp3VVS4ajlJTkxJVFRORGc/view?usp=sharing Disk 2:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0_fWRp3VVS4YzN1NUFsM2Nyek0/view?usp=sharing

An examination of these images reveals that they are very different from the ones available
from http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/bits/Apple/Lisa/monitor/ . For starters, those images (lk019_wshp84_1.dc42 and lk020_wshp84_2.dc42) contain numerous strings suggesting the presence of Macintosh development tools, e.g.

"MacIntosh Resource Compiler Version 5.1 March 30, 1984" and "Lisa Workshop-Mac Transfer Program January 1984"

plus the mysterious strings

"Error initial<cr>izing SONY drive" (<cr> == carriage return), and "go_bears"

This is pretty interesting, but also confusing---some Chicagoan was still using a Lisa 1 for Mac development in early 1984, I guess? The Lisa 2 came out in Jan 1984, so maybe this person was at the end of the list for an upgrade.

By contrast, the two disks I imaged contain no strings referring to the Macintosh or the Bears. Disk 1 also has a large EXEC file for installing the Workshop onto a ProFile, as described in the scanned Workshop 1.0 manual on bitsavers.

So, it seems these Pascal Workshop disks have not been backed up before. Hopefully Disk 3 can be saved, too. Thanks to all of you who have provided tips so far. If anyone has any further advice, or knows someone else out there who has recovered lots of old Twiggies who might be available for further consultation, I'd love to get in touch, just so I can sample and apply the entire collective wisdom of the Lisa community on this matter. (BTW, does anyone know who captured all the Twiggy disk images on bitsavers?)

Thanks again,
--Tom

On Sunday, January 25, 2015 at 1:43:53 PM UTC-5, Tom Stepleton wrote:
>
> Hi LisaListers,
>
> I took a chance the other day and bought an unopened 1.0 edition of the
> Pascal Workshop. I intend to open it once it arrives; since they aren't
> online yet, it'll be good to scan those manuals and hopefully get some disk
> images.
>
> (I don't know if there are disk images of the released 1.0 workshop on
> bitsavers; there's a set of images called "wshp84" in
> /bits/Apple/Lisa/monitor, with "26 April 84" and "backup" showing on the
> pictures of the disk label, so it certainly could be a real copy instead of
> some Apple-internal prerelease, perhaps serialized.)
>
> In any case, the Twiggies inside the box are surely of official Apple
> FileWare manufacture, which means that the magnetic media may have degraded
> somewhat already; such are the risks of buying unopened.
>
> From previous discussions on this list, it sounds like some of you
> archivists may have managed some successful reads of disks with some
> degradation. What were your techniques? How did you deal with some of the
> material accumulating on drive heads and pads?
>
> Thanks for any guidance,
> --Tom
>

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