The original professor was a pure or basic researcher producing a massive data base which later researches could add to, analyze, make sense of, and use. This was in fact his life's work - producing a database which he could hand-on to future researchers. This was indeed a noble effort and one of the reasons that I believe that pure researchers are the unsung heroes of science. Your teams effort to recover this man's trove of discovery brought tears to my eyes. Thank you all so much for your efforts and for filming the effort and sharing it here.
Well sort of - this is not quite an accurate representation. I was told he used portions of the data, the summaries we see here, to publish many articles and make important discoveries during his lifetime. But he was never able to work with the dataset in its entirety as we could far more easily do today. It was big data way before its time.
Ben's excitement when he starts talking about the discs is amazing. As an archaeologist, this is all too early for me, but as someone who loves reverse engineering file formats, I really can't wait for the next episodes!
@@macguyver209 To some degree I do so also, but images are digital and now the computer caught fire in December I had another blow to my research. Most is saved, but I did loose some - as I do not have records on what I save on laptop or on the main computer my backups turned out to be less than complete.
This reminds me of Tycho Brahe, that recorded every position of every celestial object for years. Data that was used later by Kepler to find the Kepler laws that govern the solar system
@@AndyHullMcPenguin No, because this is the Carboniferous era, that's aeons after the Snowball-Earth en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth ;) SNOBOL was always one of those languages that I heard about at school and college in the early 80s (where our comp. sci. syllabuses were rather "behind the times") but never actually saw... thanks for the Wikipedia link that's an important bit of history I'm caught up on now.
For anybody interested, Tom Phillips is interviewed and gives a demonstration of his coal ball procedure in Ep01 of the 1989 BBC documentary: "Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives", hosted by David Attenborough. It still can be found on DVD.
6:43 - "Except to us." ... I was thinking very much the same thing. I *LOVE* this, it reminds me of the kind of things that could be seen on PBS back in the '90s.
Another fantastic series unfolds! Thank you Marc & Co for your efforts! Just goes to show the importance of not only documenting and restoring old equipment but also keeping some in working conditions. How else would you retrieve the data off those floppies? Keep them coming!
I need more! Shoot I'd love to help covert those data to a modern sql database with a front end for public use. That would be such a fulfilling endeavor. I could imagine at some point creating and storing individual digital images of the samples and linking them to the dataset with a visual overlay. That would be neat
I wonder if the slices were close enough together to do tomography on (i.e. reconstruct the 3D structures from the 2D slices)? Having a fully annotated 3D model of these would be even more amazing than having the 2D images.
@@digitalshackonthelane Yeah, that's a pretty good analogy, though something like this could go further than that. They have the slices, and will hopefully have the data for what's at each grid square. They also mentioned that there is data on which structures on other slices are connected to each grid square. Depending on the quality of that data, that would potentially allow reconstructing complete structures in 3D, using images from multiple slices, and then annotate these structures with what they are, since the manual labour to classify and connect them has already been done. You could then ask questions of the dataset like: "show me the volume distribution of stems from x species" or "cluster rootlets from y species by degree of branching and show me some typical examples of different branching types". How much you could get from it depends very much on the quality of the slices and the accuracy of the annotations, but it could potentially be a really powerful dataset.
Marc, you and your friends are doing the Lord's Work when it comes to preserving computer technology and the data that is a part of it; but i find it sad that Dr Phillips will not be able to witness the fruits of his labor of 50+ years ago. i bet everyone in the Paleobotanical field are hoping you succeed in extracting that old data so it can be finally analyzed with modern computing tecniques.
Oh man, I wish I'd known about the professor's data analysis needs. My first data analysis programs, when I was a preteen, were for statistical analysis of my mom's thesis data set. A few mega bytes in size. We first used university computers, then later ones we bought. That was the mid 70s. Oh, I should mention I now have two 8" floppy drives that I've successfully read data from using a reconfigured PC floppy controller under Linux. I now use them as bookends.
I was present when all of this original work was completed in the Paleobotanical Laboratory at the University of Illinois-Champaign between 1966-1975. Dr. Phillips was like a second Father to me; took care of me when I was in the lab along with my parents. He later taught me when a was a grown up Lady. I was born at the University of Illinois on April 3, 1967. Needless to say he was in my life from my birth until his death in 2018. I will forever love you Dr. Phillips, and I miss you, and Mom, and Matt. You all were the best of times in my life. All other experiences shrink by comparison to those days in the lab, those long days in the lab, and Trenos, and Jesus Christ Superstar.. You, and my parents are etched in the deepest parts of my heart for eternity; as old as our beloved rocks; even older. God blessed you all. Love, your precious Amy.
I guess I am just as much an odd ball, I still have a working 80286 machine with 3.5" 5.25" and two 8" floppy drives....but it looks like a BUNCH of floppy disks to go through. That one cardboard box of 256K byte floppy disks would fill part of a DVD disk or take several seconds of high speed internet to transmit. Hope the oxide has not broken down. Some of the older media has proven not too stable.
Stuff like this could end up being genuinely revolutionary. This kinda data about ancient environments is rare to find and we might be able to learn some incredible things about ancient environments because of this. Once modern techniques like machine learning are applied to this who knows what we'll learn.
Cool! I started with 8" floppy's on a Grundy CP/M system. When I got it, it came with one boot disk and a Z80 assembler on it. Had to write my own floppy formatter routine on the single disk I had for the system. Scary stuff! If you need information on those, I still have some of the source code for the formatter and the BIOS routines to read them. Floppy controller chip was a WD 1793, with some luck you can still find those. 128 bytes per sector, and you'll have to find out if these are soft- or hard sector disks. Good luck on digging up the data! EDIT: I just went through my old-chip collection and found 2x WD 2793 Floppy Controller chips! If you need one to build a controller for these 8" disks, let me know.
Coincidentally I am currently in the process of getting my old TRS-80 going again after it has been sitting in storage for 25 years. Back then I built my own floppy controller (around 1982) which could control both 5.25" and 8" drives and it also used that kind of controller (1771, 1791 and 1691). Those were the days... I found the schematics for the controller as well (my own hand-drawings on large fanfeed paper sheets). First steps are to carefully powerup things and make everything running, the 5.25" cabinet blew the fuse due to a shorted mains filter. That happens... Always nice to follow Marc!
The Almaden research center was not built until the 80s or 90s. The research facility was at the Cottle Road site before. That building then turned into the materials laboratory for the hard disk drive manufacturing effort.
Interesting project and process. If they have one extra coal-ball slice that aren't doing anything important with, perhaps they could fashion a CNC-rig to photograph, and then grind a layer off of it, clean it, and scan it again, and so on. That way they could see a section of the plant. The tomography scans may be stacked for viewing in Paraview. It's free as in Free Kittens! I believe that this could be done with a diamond coated tool, perhaps a angled, cup-wheel, but what comes to mind is constructing a finely lathed drum, and having it coated with fine diamond dust. The grinding drum could be angled from the work direction to reduce streaks, like an old VRC flying head. It might be possible to cool the drum using compressed gas, or a vapor-phase system, perhaps CO2, so that it would not need a wet coolant. The slice might even be ground upside down to reduce the material that might embed itself. The scanning system would be retracted into a dusk-free enclosure while grinding. A timed blast of air could clean the sensor. An enclosure could cut down on noise, a bit. A HEPA filter could keep the dust down. (I suspect that there are other methods for polishing silicon wafer, which may work, too.)
absolutely love this video !!! i'm a geologist but never found a job as geologist so i recycle in GIS... i land a job in GIS thanks to FORTRAN that i learn for geophisics ... remember i write a program that do the work of six months in 2 hours and thay hire me !!! :) the program was in FORTRAN.
Wow, generating all that data and having no way to analyse it en masse. Essentially he dedicated his studious life to generating all this data just so later generations could do something with it. So it's highly excellent that you're getting the data back out of these disk archives, to be backed up across many different formats instead.
Normally when a video takes so long to finally get to the crux of the title, I'd say Wadsworth's constant applies, but this is so fascinating! I knew you were going to turn into the obsolete technology A-Team! DataSavers? TechRescue?
You guys are just a bunch of retro-computing heroes. And, I just find it amazing that people actually take the time to "thumbs down" something like this, what a bunch of jerks.
Those look like old Displaywriter diskettes, circa 1981. The Displaywriter was actually an IBM PC before there was an IBM PC. It was a dedicated word-processor device (8086 CPU instead of 8088) from which Don Estridge's crew "borrowed" portions of the first IBM PC's design. Some folks at IBM Austin (where the Displaywriter was made) even hooked up the 8-inch floppy drive to an IBM PC just for grins+giggles.
Good work mate, and thank you - though I am not a palaeontologist - only an ordinary dull biologist who work on current day species. I do view your contribution as valuable. :)
Marc, Could it be this is a COBOL coal ball dataset. Fortran is more likely, but the possibility is interesting.> My grandfather was a coal miner. I have seen the plant and fossil traces left in stone bordering a coal deposit. This is exactly the sort of data the WEB was invented to spread. I can imagine maps of the sites where the data came from on the WEB. Now we can support detail and imagery those who collected the data could not dream of. Good luck!!
Marc, I just realized something....... When the Phd's were describing the coal deposits, they mentioned the coal-balls composition. And hen it stuck me......! When mankind arrived and progressed into the iron age, could the process of making Steel be a Stroke of Luck ??? For instance..... someone was trying to make some refined iron from ore, and just happened to have some crushed coal-ball in with the regular coal and fired it up and Bingo !! Instead of regular iron, you now have a low grade Steel ! If you lookup how steel is made now days, you'll see limestone in the mix !! This might explain some anomalies in the history of metallurgy ! Could be the foundation for someones dissertation...... !! And Thanks Again, for all of your hard work !!
I need an episode on the OCR. You'd imagine there is still much more of data that could be scanned from mainframe prints. (any prints, not just this video's stuff) Thus exploring OCR'ing everything would be cool.
Haven't anticipated a sequel this much in years!! Cannot wait for the next episode! Creepily ironic that I watched the new PBS Eons video "When the Rainforests Collapsed" just prior to this.
What an absolutely rare and unique data set, from a very short era when coal mining and computing technology co-existed! Just think in the 19th century we had coal mining but no electronic technology to record any observations... in the 21st century we have a digital society but we’ll probably see the end of coal mining. Ps: did you just create a new science? Paleo Data Biology?! Brilliant. 👍
This is great! Looking forward to see part 2. I'm really interested to know how you'll be making that 8" drive work, as I have one and would like to get it working.
When you have the problem of data storage format obsolescence, you really need to have nerds who specialize in restoring old computer equipment -- historical preservation really pays off, even if only at infrequent intervals.
Wow! What an amazing story! I am emotional an excited at the same time. So wonderful to see how era's and scientific fields come together. And the idea of collecting that vast amount of data without knowing how to analyze it later. Great project, you are all heroes! Can't wait for the next episode. (great to see some fellow dutch people involved as well ;-)
From computers in space, to computers for archaeology.... The only thing that's going to top this is Marc & crew going to Norad to stop a rogue 70's mainframe from starting WWIII.... lol
I have a small box with a bunch of 8" floppy. I put them aside years ago, maybe in 1971? from a 360 computer room that I programmed for. I have no idea what is on them, but probably some boring business data. Still don't understand how I managed to keep them all these years.
Wait a minute! Isn’t it obvious the printouts were printed from collected data, so must have been stored on say ....floppy disks? So why didn’t they immediately look for stuff like floppy disks ? 🤯🤯🤯
It seems more reasonable to me that coal seams are the result of floating log mats which slowly drop their bark to the bottom. this accounts for the perfectly flat top and bottom of each seam, at least in the Kentucky region of the U.S. - a gentleman wrote his dissertation on this view in the late 70s (and successfully defended it).
Lots of computer history was made at that school. I know it as where Ray Ozzie studied, worked with the PLATO system and laid the ground work for Lotus Notes....
It’s still in the garage. Ken has made great progress in a software emulator, and we think we have found a set of original documentation in Europe, but we must find a way to scan it before we can start in earnest.
Those 8 inch Verbatim diskettes are certainly not 1960s, at best late 70s or 80s. You van even use a S/36 or S/38 to get the raw files. Likely EBCDIC coded.
Maybe eight-inch floppies were less expensive than nine-track magnetic tape. Or floppies are random access media while tape is sequential media. Or maybe it came from a Sytem/3x midrange system where floppies were the storage medium.
Great episode Mark, I hope those 8" floppys don't have disk rot. I seen a little moisture exposure on the one in the video. Floppys that old might be made out of something resistant to rot.
The original professor was a pure or basic researcher producing a massive data base which later researches could add to, analyze, make sense of, and use. This was in fact his life's work - producing a database which he could hand-on to future researchers. This was indeed a noble effort and one of the reasons that I believe that pure researchers are the unsung heroes of science. Your teams effort to recover this man's trove of discovery brought tears to my eyes. Thank you all so much for your efforts and for filming the effort and sharing it here.
Well sort of - this is not quite an accurate representation. I was told he used portions of the data, the summaries we see here, to publish many articles and make important discoveries during his lifetime. But he was never able to work with the dataset in its entirety as we could far more easily do today. It was big data way before its time.
Ben's excitement when he starts talking about the discs is amazing. As an archaeologist, this is all too early for me, but as someone who loves reverse engineering file formats, I really can't wait for the next episodes!
Crazy that somebody can spend decades painstakingly recording invaluable data, only for the next guys to have no ability to use it
The painful truth of obsolescence.
Why I still like paper/books... No batteries/tech required...
@@macguyver209 To some degree I do so also, but images are digital and now the computer caught fire in December I had another blow to my research. Most is saved, but I did loose some - as I do not have records on what I save on laptop or on the main computer my backups turned out to be less than complete.
This reminds me of Tycho Brahe, that recorded every position of every celestial object for years. Data that was used later by Kepler to find the Kepler laws that govern the solar system
Computer gear is not for conservation. You better use acid free paper or clay tablets.
Would it be neat to find out that they might have used COBOL to analyze the coal balls? Nah! Probably Fortran.
I just came down here to comment that... and found that you already had!
It might even be Snobol... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL
Cute and a funny pun, but nothing to do with irony.
@@JohnDlugosz Corrected. Thanks!
@@AndyHullMcPenguin No, because this is the Carboniferous era, that's aeons after the Snowball-Earth en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth ;)
SNOBOL was always one of those languages that I heard about at school and college in the early 80s (where our comp. sci. syllabuses were rather "behind the times") but never actually saw... thanks for the Wikipedia link that's an important bit of history I'm caught up on now.
For anybody interested, Tom Phillips is interviewed and gives a demonstration of his coal ball procedure in Ep01 of the 1989 BBC documentary: "Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives", hosted by David Attenborough. It still can be found on DVD.
6:43 - "Except to us." ... I was thinking very much the same thing. I *LOVE* this, it reminds me of the kind of things that could be seen on PBS back in the '90s.
Cool, a cliff hanger. I can't wait to see what you find.
3:12 "Well, their wingspan was... up to two feet"
Gee wee!
So nothing like as annoying as Scottish Midges :.)
Break out the popcorn, this is gonna be a great ride!
Another fantastic series unfolds! Thank you Marc & Co for your efforts!
Just goes to show the importance of not only documenting and restoring old equipment but also keeping some in working conditions. How else would you retrieve the data off those floppies? Keep them coming!
I really hope you will make a follow up once they established the database, and what they learned from it, that would be so awesome!
I need more! Shoot I'd love to help covert those data to a modern sql database with a front end for public use. That would be such a fulfilling endeavor. I could imagine at some point creating and storing individual digital images of the samples and linking them to the dataset with a visual overlay. That would be neat
I wonder if the slices were close enough together to do tomography on (i.e. reconstruct the 3D structures from the 2D slices)? Having a fully annotated 3D model of these would be even more amazing than having the 2D images.
@@Echin0idea Do you mean like a digital "staining" type process? Like you would do say for lab slides, only digitally?
@@digitalshackonthelane Yeah, that's a pretty good analogy, though something like this could go further than that. They have the slices, and will hopefully have the data for what's at each grid square. They also mentioned that there is data on which structures on other slices are connected to each grid square. Depending on the quality of that data, that would potentially allow reconstructing complete structures in 3D, using images from multiple slices, and then annotate these structures with what they are, since the manual labour to classify and connect them has already been done. You could then ask questions of the dataset like: "show me the volume distribution of stems from x species" or "cluster rootlets from y species by degree of branching and show me some typical examples of different branching types". How much you could get from it depends very much on the quality of the slices and the accuracy of the annotations, but it could potentially be a really powerful dataset.
@@Echin0idea Yes exactly! That would be so exciting to be a part of!
@@Echin0idea I could not agree more! I would totally be stoked to work on something like that!
Marc, you and your friends are doing the Lord's Work when it comes to preserving computer technology and the data that is a part of it; but i find it sad that Dr Phillips will not be able to witness the fruits of his labor of 50+ years ago. i bet everyone in the Paleobotanical field are hoping you succeed in extracting that old data so it can be finally analyzed with modern computing tecniques.
This is so interesting! What a great collaboration opportunity!
Oh man, I wish I'd known about the professor's data analysis needs. My first data analysis programs, when I was a preteen, were for statistical analysis of my mom's thesis data set. A few mega bytes in size. We first used university computers, then later ones we bought. That was the mid 70s. Oh, I should mention I now have two 8" floppy drives that I've successfully read data from using a reconfigured PC floppy controller under Linux. I now use them as bookends.
I was present when all of this original work was completed in the Paleobotanical Laboratory at the University of Illinois-Champaign between 1966-1975. Dr. Phillips was like a second Father to me; took care of me when I was in the lab along with my parents. He later taught me when a was a grown up Lady. I was born at the University of Illinois on April 3, 1967. Needless to say he was in my life from my birth until his death in 2018. I will forever love you Dr. Phillips, and I miss you, and Mom, and Matt. You all were the best of times in my life. All other experiences shrink by comparison to those days in the lab, those long days in the lab, and Trenos, and Jesus Christ Superstar.. You, and my parents are etched in the deepest parts of my heart for eternity; as old as our beloved rocks; even older. God blessed you all. Love, your precious Amy.
I always save my data in the most obscure old formats so future generations can have great adventures figuring out how to recover the data ! 🤯
I guess I am just as much an odd ball, I still have a working 80286 machine with 3.5" 5.25" and two 8" floppy drives....but it looks like a BUNCH of floppy disks to go through. That one cardboard box of 256K byte floppy disks would fill part of a DVD disk or take several seconds of high speed internet to transmit. Hope the oxide has not broken down. Some of the older media has proven not too stable.
They'll find a way. Even if they have to manually correct errors in the binary. Bit by bit.
My good sir, you just created a new meaning of 'Data archaeology!'
In the Arigna coal mines in Ireland, the miners hated coal balls because they could fall from the roof of the mine injuring or even killing miners.
Stuff like this could end up being genuinely revolutionary. This kinda data about ancient environments is rare to find and we might be able to learn some incredible things about ancient environments because of this. Once modern techniques like machine learning are applied to this who knows what we'll learn.
Cool! I started with 8" floppy's on a Grundy CP/M system. When I got it, it came with one boot disk and a Z80 assembler on it. Had to write my own floppy formatter routine on the single disk I had for the system. Scary stuff!
If you need information on those, I still have some of the source code for the formatter and the BIOS routines to read them. Floppy controller chip was a WD 1793, with some luck you can still find those. 128 bytes per sector, and you'll have to find out if these are soft- or hard sector disks. Good luck on digging up the data!
EDIT: I just went through my old-chip collection and found 2x WD 2793 Floppy Controller chips! If you need one to build a controller for these 8" disks, let me know.
Coincidentally I am currently in the process of getting my old TRS-80 going again after it has been sitting in storage for 25 years.
Back then I built my own floppy controller (around 1982) which could control both 5.25" and 8" drives and it also used that kind of controller (1771, 1791 and 1691).
Those were the days... I found the schematics for the controller as well (my own hand-drawings on large fanfeed paper sheets).
First steps are to carefully powerup things and make everything running, the 5.25" cabinet blew the fuse due to a shorted mains filter. That happens...
Always nice to follow Marc!
Fascinating. Looking forward to the next episode.
This looks super exciting! Can’t wait for the next episodes!
I grew up in coal mining country, my parents have coal balls decorating their garden. I had no idea they contained this stuff.
Fascinating! It shows again how small on the Earth's timeline we are....
The Almaden research center was not built until the 80s or 90s. The research facility was at the Cottle Road site before. That building then turned into the materials laboratory for the hard disk drive manufacturing effort.
Fascinating video Marc. Thanks for not dumbing down the content. Really looking forward to this series.
Interesting project and process.
If they have one extra coal-ball slice that aren't doing anything important with, perhaps they could fashion a CNC-rig to photograph, and then grind a layer off of it, clean it, and scan it again, and so on. That way they could see a section of the plant. The tomography scans may be stacked for viewing in Paraview. It's free as in Free Kittens!
I believe that this could be done with a diamond coated tool, perhaps a angled, cup-wheel, but what comes to mind is constructing a finely lathed drum, and having it coated with fine diamond dust. The grinding drum could be angled from the work direction to reduce streaks, like an old VRC flying head. It might be possible to cool the drum using compressed gas, or a vapor-phase system, perhaps CO2, so that it would not need a wet coolant. The slice might even be ground upside down to reduce the material that might embed itself.
The scanning system would be retracted into a dusk-free enclosure while grinding. A timed blast of air could clean the sensor. An enclosure could cut down on noise, a bit. A HEPA filter could keep the dust down.
(I suspect that there are other methods for polishing silicon wafer, which may work, too.)
absolutely love this video !!! i'm a geologist but never found a job as geologist so i recycle in GIS... i land a job in GIS thanks to FORTRAN that i learn for geophisics ... remember i write a program that do the work of six months in 2 hours and thay hire me !!! :) the program was in FORTRAN.
Wow, generating all that data and having no way to analyse it en masse. Essentially he dedicated his studious life to generating all this data just so later generations could do something with it. So it's highly excellent that you're getting the data back out of these disk archives, to be backed up across many different formats instead.
Normally when a video takes so long to finally get to the crux of the title, I'd say Wadsworth's constant applies, but this is so fascinating!
I knew you were going to turn into the obsolete technology A-Team! DataSavers? TechRescue?
I've never seen such a huge stash of 8" disks before, he must have spent ages and ages entering all that information
You guys are just a bunch of retro-computing heroes. And, I just find it amazing that people actually take the time to "thumbs down" something like this, what a bunch of jerks.
Those look like old Displaywriter diskettes, circa 1981. The Displaywriter was actually an IBM PC before there was an IBM PC. It was a dedicated word-processor device (8086 CPU instead of 8088) from which Don Estridge's crew "borrowed" portions of the first IBM PC's design. Some folks at IBM Austin (where the Displaywriter was made) even hooked up the 8-inch floppy drive to an IBM PC just for grins+giggles.
I am very happy to bump into your channel. Fascinating job.
Good work mate, and thank you - though I am not a palaeontologist - only an ordinary dull biologist who work on current day species.
I do view your contribution as valuable. :)
Curious Marc: please never stop being curious. 😘
Marc, Could it be this is a COBOL coal ball dataset. Fortran is more likely, but the possibility is interesting.> My grandfather was a coal miner. I have seen the plant and fossil traces left in stone bordering a coal deposit. This is exactly the sort of data the WEB was invented to spread. I can imagine maps of the sites where the data came from on the WEB. Now we can support detail and imagery those who collected the data could not dream of. Good luck!!
Marc, I just realized something....... When the Phd's were describing the coal deposits, they mentioned the coal-balls composition. And hen it stuck me......! When mankind arrived and progressed into the iron age, could the process of making Steel be a Stroke of Luck ??? For instance..... someone was trying to make some refined iron from ore, and just happened to have some crushed coal-ball in with the regular coal and fired it up and Bingo !! Instead of regular iron, you now have a low grade Steel ! If you lookup how steel is made now days, you'll see limestone in the mix !! This might explain some anomalies in the history of metallurgy ! Could be the foundation for someones dissertation...... !! And Thanks Again, for all of your hard work !!
This looks like a histology slide. Amazing that they were able to come up with a procedure to generate specimens with this much detail.
Yeah the Dolch PAC back in action. I love the series were you repair that quirky machine. Hopefully you have an OS to suit;)
I need an episode on the OCR. You'd imagine there is still much more of data that could be scanned from mainframe prints. (any prints, not just this video's stuff) Thus exploring OCR'ing everything would be cool.
Maybe that CZUR book scanning ep has something to do with this.
This is really exciting. Can’t wait to see how this all works out!!
Cool, cool, cool. I’m on board for this one. 👍🏻
Wow what great interests you have.
From r2d2 to moon lander computers to ancient plant life. Keep up the great work. Thank you.
Haven't anticipated a sequel this much in years!! Cannot wait for the next episode! Creepily ironic that I watched the new PBS Eons video "When the Rainforests Collapsed" just prior to this.
I am so excited about this series, I also really want to learn more about Antoine, that shot of all of those chips looked like pure heaven.
I cant wait for the next episode!
I can't wait to see next episode! Thanks guys!
What an absolutely rare and unique data set, from a very short era when coal mining and computing technology co-existed!
Just think in the 19th century we had coal mining but no electronic technology to record any observations... in the 21st century we have a digital society but we’ll probably see the end of coal mining.
Ps: did you just create a new science? Paleo Data Biology?! Brilliant. 👍
Thank you, another epic episode.
Amazing! Great job guys!
So you found 300 million years old floppy disks which contained information about the flora of Sahara of the 1960ies?
U.V. S. LMFAO 😆😂😂😂
Wow, amazing.
I can't wait for the next one :D.
This is great! Looking forward to see part 2. I'm really interested to know how you'll be making that 8" drive work, as I have one and would like to get it working.
When you have the problem of data storage format obsolescence, you really need to have nerds who specialize in restoring old computer equipment -- historical preservation really pays off, even if only at infrequent intervals.
What an astounding story!
This is gonna be so cool! UIUC BSME 1988
Wow! What an amazing story! I am emotional an excited at the same time. So wonderful to see how era's and scientific fields come together. And the idea of collecting that vast amount of data without knowing how to analyze it later. Great project, you are all heroes! Can't wait for the next episode. (great to see some fellow dutch people involved as well ;-)
Cant wait. Wahoo thanks guys
Go Marc and team! This appears to be shaping up to be a super exciting set of episodes!
From computers in space, to computers for archaeology.... The only thing that's going to top this is Marc & crew going to Norad to stop a rogue 70's mainframe from starting WWIII.... lol
I thought they found fossilized floppy disks.
What an exciting story !
as an old fossil myself I can't take these cliff hangers!!! your going to cause me a heat attack!
Woow! This is AMAZING! Looking forward to see the rest of it! You are amazing guys!
Awesome, just awesome. Can't wait for the next epoisodes.
This is going to be a veeery good series. Watched it twice.
Can feel this is going to be a great adventure, thx for sharing-and such a teaser for the next episode!
So glad you are working on such problems!
40 years ago i repaired and maintained those floppy disk drives in nixdorf 8860 computers. hard sectored and 78 kbytes of endless space :- )
I have a small box with a bunch of 8" floppy. I put them aside years ago, maybe in 1971? from a 360 computer room that I programmed for. I have no idea what is on them, but probably some boring business data. Still don't understand how I managed to keep them all these years.
This was awsome! If he's interested of course we would love to see more of this guy!
This is great work.
Wait a minute! Isn’t it obvious the printouts were printed from collected data, so must have been stored on say ....floppy disks? So why didn’t they immediately look for stuff like floppy disks ? 🤯🤯🤯
That was absolutely fascinating! Thank you Marc, for these wonderful programs..
So great, can't wait for the next episode!
It seems more reasonable to me that coal seams are the result of floating log mats which slowly drop their bark to the bottom. this accounts for the perfectly flat top and bottom of each seam, at least in the Kentucky region of the U.S. - a gentleman wrote his dissertation on this view in the late 70s (and successfully defended it).
What a tease. I'm may not be able to sleep until I know if the floppies survived their long hibernation.
Very interesting. That area of work would not be for me but looking forward to the next part.
Lots of computer history was made at that school. I know it as where Ray Ozzie studied, worked with the PLATO system and laid the ground work for Lotus Notes....
Not surprised at the Dutch names in the title - the accents gave them away.
Ça me rappelle le x360 dans votre garage ! Any news ! Meme si le temps a été bien rempli !
Encore merci !
It’s still in the garage. Ken has made great progress in a software emulator, and we think we have found a set of original documentation in Europe, but we must find a way to scan it before we can start in earnest.
wow this is so exciting !
Ahhhhhhh... i cannot wait till the next episode!!!!!
10:23 - Perfect example for when someone else pays for your paper supplies!
Can't wait for the next one!
Tom Collins, clearly ahead of his time
I love a good mystery. Good luck and fortune on your quest.
Very interesting! I'm looking forward to seeing the results. If anyone can do it, you can!
I love all you videos Marc. you are all amazing!
Those 8 inch Verbatim diskettes are certainly not 1960s, at best late 70s or 80s. You van even use a S/36 or S/38 to get the raw files. Likely EBCDIC coded.
Why do you suppose if they had access to an IBM mainframe, they didn't archive the data on 9 track mag tape?
Maybe eight-inch floppies were less expensive than nine-track magnetic tape. Or floppies are random access media while tape is sequential media. Or maybe it came from a Sytem/3x midrange system where floppies were the storage medium.
Give a all new meaning to the term: data rot. Hope you can recover the data form the floppy disk keep the good work
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Great episode Mark, I hope those 8" floppys don't have disk rot. I seen a little moisture exposure on the one in the video. Floppys that old might be made out of something resistant to rot.
Freeze frame at 8.53 - it’s a fossil fish!
Simply wonderful!
What are the chances that COBOL was used in creating the coal ball diskettes?
Given this was done at the University of Illinois I'd assume it was likely fortran, given the pool of grad students he was able to draw from.
14:00 my god, the absolute soul crushing tedium
Press F for the grad students.
It's Berkeley - they probably have a dozen eager undergrads who want some "lab experience" ;)