Cool. Yeah, floppies can surprise. Seems like if they didn't lose their data in the first couple of years, they can still be readable decades later.

I wish our old stuff was on floppies. It's all on a Stacker compressed HDD that spilled oil at some point and now only reads half the data, remaining undecipherable. 😒

I went looking through several disks a few weeks ago, except I didn't make any backups. Most were high density 5.25" floppies from when we had a 286 or 386 computer for the whole family. But I found a few that were 360k and they had grainy GIFs scanned from magazines. Ahh my old pr0n stash hidden with ATTRIB +H. 😊

if 'fm.com' is old school hex editor, can you zip the .com+.doc up for me? i have fm.com somewhere with no doc but it would be nice to get a matched pair from 1986 😀 its what i based my own kickass hex editor on when i wrote on in dos!

That is indeed "File Modify". Attached:

That whole disk is kind of interesting, it's a utilities disk compiled by the two guys who ran the company we bought our 386/16 from when it was bleeding edge. Some cool & unusual software on there, like the classic INSULT.COM 😉
It also seems to be where I first encountered QEdit, a text editor I still use to this day (although "my" QEdit is a newer version than the one on here, don't remember where I eventually upgraded.)

I don't think anyone would be bothered if I uploeded the whole thing for you guys to enjoy, so grab it here and tell me if you find something cool. 😁

1     
2                               FUTURETRON LTD.
3  
4                T R O N   B U S I N E S S   C O M P U T E R S
5            
6            
7                   Markham - Mississuaga - Toronto - London
8
9    
10         þ Advanced Computer Hardware          þ Networking Systems
11     
12         þ CADD/CAM Work Stations              þ Custom Programming
13     
14         þ Desktop Publishing Systems          þ System Consultants
15    
16
17
18    ----------------------------------------------------------------------
19
20
21          PRESS   - PAGE DOWN/UP to view document a page at a time.
22      
23                  - ARROW DOWN/UP to scroll line by line
24     
25      
26
27
28                ÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ
29                FUTURETRON UTILITIES DISKETTE  VER 1.1 1989
30                ÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ
31                             
32                   Compiled by Ron Price & Scott Fletcher
33                                                                                                 
34                ÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ
35                               W A R N I N G
36                ÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ
37                Ron and I offer this collection of programs
38                as a courtesy to  our customers.  We DO NOT
39                offer  support  or  advice  regarding  this
40                software whatsoever. If you phone us with a
41                question  or complaint about these programs
42                WE WILL HANG UP THE PHONE!   FUTURETRON Ltd.
43                is not responsible in any way  for problems
44                resulting from the use of this software. We
45                chose  these  programs   on  the  basis  of
46                usefulness,  ease of use,  and program size.
47                We feel this is an excellent  collection of
48                software. We hope you enjoy it.
49                ÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ
50
51
52
53this disk contains...
54ÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ
55ALARM     COM   Alarm clock
56ARCHIVE   EXE   XT hard drive backup utility                                   
57ASC       COM   Pop up ASCII table
58BLANK10   COM   Causes screen to "blank" after 10 minutes of nonÍuse.
59BOOTSCRN        Used by DirMagic as title screen (text file)
60BROWSE    COM   Allows scrolling through DOS test files

61CLOCK     COM   Permanent clock on upper right of screen
62CLOCK2    COM   Same as CLOCK but does not show seconds. Beeps every 15 min.
63CMINOR    COM   Music demo program
64CMINOR    MUS   Data for CMINOR.COM
65CO        COM   PC Magazine's COpy file directory utility
66DDIR      COM   Shows a double width directory listing.
67DINSTALL  COM   Installation program for DIRMAGIC
68DIRMAGIC  COM   Extensive file management system
69DISKLITE  COM   Shows disk drive access indicator on screen
70DISKSCAN  COM   Scans any disk media for defects
71DM        COM   Sister file to DIRMAGIC provides directory maintenance
72DOSEDIT   COM   Stores previously entered DOS commands for re-use
73DR        COM   PC Magazine's directory utility
74DSPOOL    COM   Printer spooler
75EGA       COM   For setting EGA monitors to 43 line mode.
76FM        COM   File Modify. for modifying contents of any file.
77FM        DOC   File Modify document file
78FREE      COM   Shows free space on current disk drive
79HELPME    COM   Speech synthysis demo
80HGCIBM    COM   Colour graphics emulator for HERCULES
81HGCIBM    DOC   Documentation for HGCIBM
82INSULT    COM   Insult your friends with this insult generating program
83KEYCLICK  COM   Causes key click sound
84KEYSUB    COM   KEY SUBstitution. Change any key to any other.
85LOCKOUT   COM   Disables keyboard until special key sequence pressed
86MANUAL          Documentation for DIRMAGIC
87MEMORY    COM   Shows available RAM
88MYKEY     DEF   Keyboard definition for QEDIT program
89NOCURS    COM   Turns off cursor. Useful for batch files
90NORMCURS  COM   Turns on cursor.
91PARK      COM   Hard drive park utility
92PCBOSS    COM   Hard drive file management program
93PCMAP     COM   Shows memory usage including TSRs, Shells and DOS
94POP-CAL   COM   Pop-up calender
95POPCALC   COM   Pop-up calculator
96PRMANUAL  COM   For printing DIRMAGIC documentation
97Q         CMD   Internal information required by QEDIT program
98Q         COM   QEDIT extensive wordprocessing program
99Q         HLP   On-line help file for QEDIT
100QCONFG    COM   Configuration file for QEDIT
101QEDIT     DOC   Documentation for QEDIT
102QKEY      DEF   Keyboard definition file for QEDIT
103QUICKEYS  COM   Increases the repeat rate of the keyboard
104RAMCLK    COM   Read Clock utility for some TRON computers
105RDCLK     COM   Read Clock utility. Retrieves date/time from the system.
106REBOOT    COM   Resets the computer. Either warm or cold boot
107RESPRO    COM   Advanced resident program management
108RESPRO    DOC   Documentation for RESPRO
109RN        COM   PC Magazine's Re-Name directory utility
110SETCLK    COM   Set clock utility for some TRON Computers
111SETUP     COM   Resident printer set-up utility
112STCLK     COM   Set Clock. Sets battery backed-up clock time/date
113TED       COM   Tiny EDitor. For editing text files or basic word processing
114TED       DOC   TED document file
115TRONHELP        THIS FILE
116VOID      EXE   Causes immediate screen blanking until a key is pressed
117WHERE     COM   Searches entire hard drive for specified file
118WRITFILE  EXE   For creating test files of any size
119
120[...]

xjas wrote:

That is indeed "File Modify". Attached: […]
Show full quote

That is indeed "File Modify". Attached:

FM.zip

That whole disk is kind of interesting, it's a utilities disk compiled by the two guys who ran the company we bought our 386/16 from when it was bleeding edge. Some cool & unusual software on there, like the classic INSULT.COM 😉
It also seems to be where I first encountered QEdit, a text editor I still use to this day (although "my" QEdit is a newer version than the one on here, don't remember where I eventually upgraded.)

thanks.

speaking of qedit, I have I think a v2/v3/v4/jr somewhere. In my dos days my 'professional' editor was TSE, TheSemwareEditor (aka qedit pro or something). kinda funny you can still buy it 🤣 http://semware.com/

they even updated their website to say it works on windows 10! oh man, so funny.

FuzzyLogic wrote:

I went looking through several disks a few weeks ago, except I didn't make any backups. Most were high density 5.25" floppies from when we had a 286 or 386 computer for the whole family. But I found a few that were 360k and they had grainy GIFs scanned from magazines. Ahh my old pr0n stash hidden with ATTRIB +H. 😊

Wow, reminds me of my dads stuff. He used PC Tools Backup somewhen in the 80s.
At the verge of the new millenium, I tried to read back those images and it didn't work (5.25" floppies).
Me and my dad found out that the program was unaware of the modern version of FAT16 and so it was unable to
access the hard disk partition. Our workaround was to create a small 32MB partition with PC-DOS 3.30 and everything went fine.
I really loved that program, because it had this professional touch..
Among his Backups were awesome things, like the forgotten Public Domain version of Z80MU (anyone interested ?).

BloodyCactus wrote:

speaking of qedit, I have I think a v2/v3/v4/jr somewhere. In my dos days my 'professional' editor was TSE, TheSemwareEditor (aka qedit pro or something). kinda funny you can still buy it 🤣 http://semware.com/

they even updated their website to say it works on windows 10! oh man, so funny.

Nice. I don't use Windows 10 but if I did ... I would still use QEdit, in exactly the same way I do on Linux / MacOS - pop open a DOSBox instance when I need to edit something (and don't care about the CR/LF discrepancy) and type away. 😁

QEdit has one of the best features I've ever seen in a DOS editor - from the command line you can type "Q *.txt *.doc *.nfo" and it will open *all* the .txt, .doc & .nfo files in the directory, in order, and you can cycle through them. Just close the one you're looking at (ESC->Q->enter) and the next one pops up. SO useful.

I think my usual version is 2.00something. Fun fact: if any of you are running QEdit 2.x, and you can crudely pan the screen up and down with F11/F12 without moving the cursor off the current line, that's actually my QEdit. Those were key macros I added in, and for some reason that version got spread a bit on utility sites around 1997~1998. I wonder if any copies of it are still floating around out there...

xjas wrote:

Those were key macros I added in, and for some reason that version got spread a bit on utility sites around 1997~1998. I wonder if any copies of it are still floating around out there...

nice. I did the crack for v3 + v4 for giggles. I know the v4 crack is around on my hd. I paid for TSE tho, was well worth it. I remember qedit was the first editor I used with like a programing language in it for macros, was mind blowing to me, so so powerful.

tse/qedit + list.com were the two big utils I used all the time.

TSE Pro is a pure Win32 application (which renders its own text-mode UI - feels like a console window, but isn't). Still great.

I still have hundreds of our old homemade floppies, mostly ancient 5.25" DD disks but there's a box of 3.5"s too. Don't think most of them are still fully readable, but hopefully I'll find out before the end of the year...

Managed to get a few more done this morning. No read errors whatsoever! I also borrowed a disused scanner from work so I can start scanning the labels.

Totally stoked about how well this is going; looks like about 95% of the data hasn't rotted. 😎

For your viewing pleasure, here's a (shitty) Pascal graphics demo thing I wrote at a computer camp when I was 12-13(ish.) Maybe it still builds. Assume some version of Turbo Pascal in a DOS environment. (Note: I wasn't using the 'xjas' alias back then, I changed it just now before posting.)

1program GraphicsDemo;
2   uses graph, crt;
3
4var
5   gd,gm: integer;
6   ch: string;
7
8procedure design1;
9var
10i,lin:integer;
11begin
12  Randomize;
13  lin :=0;
14  i:= random(5);
15  for i :=1 to 100 do
16  begin
17     setcolor(random(16)+1);
18     circle (320, 240, i*5);
19  end;
20    repeat
21    setcolor(random(16)+1);
22       Line(320, 240, 0, 0);
23       Line(320, 240, 640, 0);
24       Line(320, 240,
25         lin, (480));
26         lin:=lin+3;
27       until lin>640;
28  readln;
29end;
30
31procedure design2;
32var i: integer;
33begin
34   cleardevice;
35   for i := 1 to 25 do
36   begin
37      setcolor(yellow);
38      Line(0, i*10, 250-(i-1)*10, 0);
39      setcolor (1);
40       line(640 - i*10, 480, 640, 230+i*10);
41      setcolor(green);
42      line(640, i*10, 250-(i-1)*10, 480);
43   end;
44
45
46   readln;
47end;
48
49procedure Game;
50var
51  Gd, Gm, x, y: Integer;
52  P      : pointer;
53  c:char;
54  Size   : Word;
55procedure goo(var x,y:integer);
56begin
57if x>640 then x:=0;
58if x<0 then x:=640;
59if y<0 then Y:=480;
60if y>480 then y:=0;

61end;
62procedure gootwo;
63begin
64   if(x>194) and (x<206) and (y>300) and (y<400) then begin
65   x := random (640);
66   y := random (480); sound(500);
67   delay(000);
68   nosound;
69  end;
70end;
71begin
72  Bar(0, 0, GetMaxX, GetMaxY);
73  Size := ImageSize(10,20,30,40);
74  GetMem(P, Size);
75  GetImage(10,20,30,40,P^);
76  setcolor(black);
77  outtextXY(150, 240,'     *****FIND THE HIDDEN TELEPORT*****');
78  outtextXY(70, 250,'Use arrow keys to move, type "E" to end. Hit enter to start.');
79  ReadLn;
80  x :=320; y :=240;
81  ClearDevice;
82  PutImage(x, y, P^, xorPut);
83  repeat
84  c:= readkey;
85  PutImage(x, y, P^, xorPut);
86  case ord (c) of
87  55 : begin
88           x := x-8;
89           y := y-5;
90        end;
91  56, 72 : y := y-5;
92  57 : begin
93           x := x+8;
94           y := y-5;
95        end;
96  52, 75 : x := x-8;
97  54, 77 : x := x+8;
98  49 : begin
99           x := x-8;
100           y := y+10;
101        end;
102  80, 50 : y := y+10;
103  51 : begin
104           x := x+8;
105           y := y+10;
106        end;
107  end;
108  goo(x,y);
109  gootwo;
110  line(200, 300, 200, 400);
111  putimage(x, y, P^, xorput);
112  until (c = 'e') or (c = 'E');
113end;
114
115
116
117begin
118   Repeat
119      closeGraph;
120      clrscr;
121      Writeln('M A I N   M E N U');
122      writeln('1. "Highway To Eternity" by xjas. Type "1"');
123      writeln('2. "Inverted Worlds" by (once again) xjas. Type "2"');
124      writeln('3. "Hidden Teleporter" a game by (you guessed it) xjas. Type "3"');
125      writeln('(To use the neumeric keypad for this game please be sure that the `numlock`');
126      writeln('is ON.)');
127      writeln('4.  Quit, not by xjas. Type "4"');
128      Readln(Ch);
129      gd:=detect;
130      initgraph(gd,gm,'');
131      if (ch = '1') then design1;
132      if (ch = '2') then design2;
133      if (ch = '3') then game;
134   until (ch = '4');
135end.

To everyone else with boxes of historical floppies sitting around, BACK THEM UP! You never know what kind of cool old data you might find. Feel free to post the results here. 😎

xjas wrote:

For your viewing pleasure, here's a (shitty) Pascal graphics demo thing I wrote at a computer camp when I was 12-13(ish.) Maybe it still builds. Assume some version of Turbo Pascal in a DOS environment.

Wow! It looks very good!

Compiling in Turbo Pascal 4 was no problem.

I've attached some pics for you!

Haha, OMG. So cool. I had no idea if it was in a working state or not; it's probably been 20 years since I've seen the output of that thing. Thanks for that.

I have more of these, I should post them all up. 😁

What does insult.com do?

xjas wrote:

Haha, OMG. So cool. I had no idea if it was in a working state or not; it's probably been 20 years since I've seen the output of that thing. Thanks for that.

I have more of these, I should post them all up. 😁

You are welcome! ^^

Good idea, why not ?
I'm sure people will also be glad to have something "new" to play with on their vintage hardware. 😀

Jade Falcon wrote:

What does insult.com do?

It insults the user, I think. It must be one of these joke programs..
Ideal for autoexec.bat 😁 Reminds me of my dad..

He sometimes played tricks like this on his colleagues. Like adding a fake C64 screen in autoexec.bat on a colleagues' hi-end 486. 🤣
Or changing the start-up sound in Windows 3.1 from "tada" to the voice of a russian newscaster (recorded from shortwave radio ?) 😁
Too bad I haven't seen the poor preys' faces!

xjas wrote:

To everyone else with boxes of historical floppies sitting around, BACK THEM UP! You never know what kind of cool old data you might find. Feel free to post the results here. 😎

When I tried to recover my old floppies a couple of years ago I found that most of them had surface mold and as a result had lots of read errors. I couldn't recover much. That's what happens when you leave that kind of stuff in a somewhat damp environment 🙁

However a guy recently approached me with a few 5,25" 360KB floppies that he needed to recover data from and most of it I was able to recover. 3 of them were even GEM original disks, but these had a few damaged files so I don't think they will work anymore.

I've never seen insult.com, but I remember some weird TSR virus-ish thing on an old Apple II floppy full of shareware games. After exiting one of the games it would take over the prompt and refuse to carry out your commands until you figured out the "choice phrase to banish me" or something like that. I think "go to hell" worked. I guess stuff like that was all fun and games in the days before hard drives.

xjas mentioned using it, but for anybody else who will be attempting a similar project, I highly recommend ddrescue. It's a linux command line tool and that's a turnoff to some, but it's perfect for this. If you reference the same log file for each recovery attempt of a given disk, then the program will use that log to keep track of what portions of the disk still need to be recovered. This way it can combine the results of repeated attempts, even using multiple drives.
I tried a known bad floppy with ddrescue and noticed that the unreadable address range was different for 2 different drives. Combining the two almost made a complete image, and I still had a bunch more drives I could have tried if I were desperate.

However, the fun ended when I tried a later generation "2X" LS120 drive which just went and read the whole thing by itself. Spoilsport.

By popular request (click the images, the forum scaler does weird things with animated gifs):

I tried to give you the full INSULTS.COM experience here, but I encourage you to run the program yourself as its content is procedurally generated. 😉

Also, can't neglect option 3:

...an ad for actual commercial software they were trying to charge $20 for in 1983. I love it.

xjas wrote:

Totally stoked about how well this is going; looks like about 95% of the data hasn't rotted. 😎

This has been my experience as well. Even though backing up is good practice and you should be doing it RIGHT NOW, a floppy stored in a normal environment (=non extreme temperatures or humidity) is extremely likely to still have all its data intact. I believe read/write cycles is what kills most floppies, not time. It's true that floppies have a shorter half life than most other medium, but the common view that the floppies in your attic are already dead is plain untrue.

It's not too late yet, but back them up before it is.

wish this was my case, most of my 3.5 floppies died years ago, or the even more annoying bad sectors which always managed to corrupt the driver and not the installer, txt file or whatever. I doubt I have more then 5 disks from the 90's in still good condition.

The old Apple IIe 5.25 disks lasted without any problems though