The Joy of Dumping | Hacker News Reader

The Joy of Dumping

nycresistor.com

112 pointsbenwr14 comments

Ahhh EPROMs, so much fun to be had with these lil guys. They're everywhere!

It really is a lot of fun to dump old chips and see what they contain. I have a few devices here at the office that I like to update configs on just to hyper-terminal in on and play around with once in a while. EEPROM's are a similar sort of fun, but always feels just that much more nostalgically "legacy."

I've got a USB based EPROM burner which makes easy work of the burning and flashing.

Got my start with this type of thing when I used it to burn EPROM's for my friends and modify their ECU's to accept EPROMS vs the factory read-only chips that came in them.

We'd dump the original EPROM values, adjust things, burn it all back to an EEPROM and pop it in the freshly added ZIF socket. Voila, new fuel/timing maps. :)

This relates to something I've been feeling lately.. we're losing so much of our digital culture.

I was reminiscing about the Web development scene in the mid to late 90s and while I've found scraps (including Microsoft's first CSS demo showcase for IE 3) the majority of the pioneering work I remember from the time is either next to impossible to find or flat out gone. And archive.org/Wayback Machine seems to have almost given up keeping a deep history of the Web - its coverage seems to get worse year by year.

The problem is, where do we store this stuff so it can live for decades to come (because copying to our current machine will likely make it live on for only a short while)? Or, perhaps the question is even.. should we bother?

> This relates to something I've been feeling lately.. we're losing so much of our digital culture.

We're losing a huge percentage of what's being created, but the overall percentage preserved is going up lightning-fast... it's weird as a historian to try to go through history, knowing it's incredibly incomplete. Landmark global-defining events regarding the early Roman Republic, Mongolian Khanates, etc, are incredibly poorly documented, and scholarly works on the topic contain tons of speculation and guesses about what happened to fill in the blanks.

Like, really basic trivial stuff that wasn't recorded because the price/benefit ratio wasn't worth doing when capture and transmission of information was so expensive.

While we're losing a lot, the rate at which we can and do keep things is growing tremendously... it'll be an interesting future, for sure. (Sorting through all the mess, on the other hand, is going to become much trickier...)

>The problem is, where do we store this stuff so it can live for decades to come

For US and US-related sites at least, the Library of Congress is probably the best institution for that job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress

Same with old sub 1gb harddrives. I do a full dd_rescue before I toss them away for good, lest they contain ancient history :)

Nothing like connecting up one of your old HDDs and seeing what sort of data you used to have that you now forgot about.

Add floppies to the list too!

This is how I found a fully functional install of Windows 3.1, which happens to run quite happily inside VirtualBox.

'incoherent, mumbling ghosts everywhere' -> great metaphor!

I do this too, albeit mostly as a precursor to erasing the EPROM and recycling it for something else.

Am I mistaken or is the author one of the MakerBot founders?

That's correct -- phooky is Adam Mayer's handle.

We had an old EPROM programmer in college - was awesome.. And this isn't ancient history, this was 2007 - we used it as part of our Comp Arch course!

Oh boy do I have some EEPROM's for this guy to dump .. old hardware never dies: its users do!

(Yamaha A5000 sampler, I'm looking at you..)

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