Re: UniPlus UNIX: oops...

Blair Aakre wrote:

>Can you make disk images (Using Disk Copy 4.2 on a Mac) of them before
>you ship them off?
>
>
>On Feb 13, 2008, at 3:03 PM, -jeffB wrote:
>
>
>
>>...as in, "oops, I wish I'd found this group sooner."
>>
>>I was a grad student in Virginia Tech's CS department in 1985, when
>>they required all incoming CS freshmen to buy Lisas running the
>>UniPlus UNIX system. I wanted one badly enough not only to get in on
>>the student deal, but to pay something like $300 extra for the FLOPPY
>>distribution of UniPlus.
>>
>>Fast-forward 23 years, and in the wake of recent $3500-4000 closing
>>prices, I decided to list my Lisa on eBay. AFTER starting the
>>auction, I found my UniPlus disks. All sixteen of them. "Sure", I
>>thought, "those disks will be PERFECTLY readable after twenty-three
>>years, the last eleven spent in a non-climate-controlled garage."
>>
>>Well, I tried running the installation last night (to a ProFile whose
>>MacWorks installation had gotten corrupted), and the first part of it
>>appeared to work. I got no read errors on either of the first two
>>disks, which let me install the bootstrap loader. Unfortunately, the
>>process hung right before I reached the UNIX prompt. This *might*
>>mean that the disk is hosed, but it may also mean that I need more
>>memory -- the standard config was 1MB of RAM, and one of my RAM boards
>>went south a few years ago.
>>
>>So, a dilemma: I have this set of disks, possibly still readable,
>>which I'm obliged to ship with the Lisa when it sells (the auction
>>closes Sunday). I'd really rather not see this OS lost to history
>>(although I probably would've said differently at the time I was using
>>it). But the disks are serialized to my machine, Unisoft has long
>>since moved on to other things, and IIRC the Lisa's low-level diskette
>>formatting is odd enough that I'm not sure whether the disks can be
>>copied.
>>
>>What should I do in my few remaining days with the diskettes? "Cancel
>>the auction" is tempting, but I've been working myself up to selling
>>this thing for a long time, and if I don't do it now, I might not be
>>able to later. It's unlikely to keep running forever anyhow, and I
>>don't want to be in the Lisa-maintenance business.
>>
>>I've used Service Mode to copy my machine's serial and AppleNet
>>values. I don't know whether those are the only pieces of information
>>the UniPlus installer uses for serialization; I don't know how to find
>>out. I don't remember much about UniPlus, but I have the disks and
>>installation instructions, and it looks like that makes me the world's
>>surviving authority. (There were something like 300 students who got
>>these; surely SOMEONE still has the stuff squirrelled away, but Google
>>doesn't know where...)
>>
>>
>>Now what?
>>
I would say cancel the auction until you can make disk images, and re-list it once you have made the images. Disk Copy 4.2 or DART on a Mac with a built-in floppy drive (but not a New World or x86 Mac with a USB floppy drive) will work. Any later version of Disk Copy will not work, since the later versions discard tags, which Lisas require for booting (and LisaOS uses them in its filesystem).

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LisaList" group. To post to this group, send email to lisalist_at_email.domain.hidden To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lisalist-unsubscribe_at_email.domain.hidden For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lisalist?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~--- Received on 2008-02-13 16:43:26