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All in a Day's Work

A couple of days ago, someone came into the BCRC to ask about rescuing some old data files. He had a bunch of figures he'd created in MacDraw in the late 1980s that he wanted to recover. I agreed to meet with him today to see what we could do.

We have one old MDD G4 that I have carefully preserved that can still run Classic (ie, MacOS 9). It wouldn't fire up initially and I had to reset the PMU to get it to boot. It had forgotten the date-time, so we needed to reboot it after it set the time and became unstable.

He'd already gotten help from someone to read his old floppies, but the old Mac couldn't read his thumbdrive. We copied the files to an SMB volume, but then found that whoever recovered the files only recovered the data-forks, so we couldn't open them anyway. So I got out our old floppy drive and we went back to the original floppies to get good copies of the files.

We tried a number of old applications. I had a copy of Appleworks (from after Apple bought Claris), but that didn't work. Eventually, I found that you can download several different old versions of MacDraw and we began trying those. Eventually, we found that they would open with MacDraw II Version 1.0v1. But although they would open, the screen wouldn't update properly -- perhaps the application isn't "32-bit clean" or something. The window only contained a smear of multicolored static.

But I had read something that suggested printing the drawings to a file to get a Postscript copy of the image. And this worked! So we set up an assembly line: he went back to the floppies and got good copies of the files, we opened them with MacDraw one by one (restarting periodically because it would crash after you'd opened up a few) and printing them to Postscript. Then we copied everything to SMB and I downloaded the files to his thumbdrive from my office computer.

The room where I've kept this computer is going to be renovated and I had been on the fence about what to do with this computer. But you know what? I think I'll just take this whole workstation and put it in into the Living Museum of Dead Computers in working order in case anyone else needs to rescue stuff from the old days.