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Comment by apaprocki | Hacker News Reader

Re: losing BBS/source from the 90's -- I was fortunate enough to regularly back things up to QIC tape, and lo and behold, 22 years later a hacked up box restored the BBS perfectly and it ran in DosBox on my laptop. I was pleasantly surprised that it all worked immediately. Hardest part was finding parts for a floppy tape and installing the right Windows version. Seeing the ANSI art made it all worth it...

https://twitter.com/apaprocki/status/550432891201941504

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Smartest decision I ever made was backing up all my old childhood 68k and PPC Macintosh systems to QIC using a friends SCSI drive. Later I bought a ClubMac (haha remember them) drive for nothing on eBay. A couple years ago I was able to restore some old old systems from the attic, nostalgia city ! I think I had some Mac specific BBS software in there somewhere, TeleFinder and FirstClass I remember. There was another GUI based one, I think NovaTerm. I sure wish I would have imaged some of the Apple IIgs software though before all the floppies went bad.

I still have some 3.5" floppy disks with my BBS and the door's I wrote for it. My parents still use a USB floppy drive (and have several) because they have a sewing machine that uses it. Perhaps I'll give this a try.

I had some old 3.5" floppies I tried to read recently. Unfortunately it seems that they didn't survive the long dark in my parents' closet, and were unreadable, at least by consumer hardware... maybe a data recovery service could extract the data.

Amazing that you got it back up and running! I would love to see some of the old messages on the public message boards of my BBS from those days.

I had a tape drive as well,and I did back things up at the time, but even those backups are gone.

Frankly I'm most impressed that you had a QIC drive available.

The current owners of Colorado Backup software IP made it freeware a number of years back as well. (Thanks!) Without that you'd also have to find ancient software to pull it off the tape.

> Hardest part was finding parts for a floppy tape and installing the right Windows version

Surely you mean floppy drive?

QIC-40 and QIC-80 drives connected to the floppy disk controller.

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