Re: The first xy (flakey floppies)

[jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

Thomas J Hawley wrote:

> Floppies that have been sitting around since the days of XyWrite I are probably
> unreadable now, even if you have the 5.25" drive. I recently had to toss a
> number of 3.5" floppies that were created about 10 years ago; none of them were
> readable after trying on several machines.

I have quite a number of floppies that are at least that old, which can still be
read . . . but you can't count on it. The other day, I was trying to install Xerox
Textbridge 3.02 (said to be the last version that would work in the Win-OS2
subsystem), from a 6 floppy set. These disks had only been used a couple times,
and stored under good conditions. A few files on two of the disks could not be
read, in some cases could not be found. They happened to be unimportant files for
my purposes, but the Win-16 installer would not skip over them, and kept bombing
out. I tried multiple times, then used a cleaning diskette on the drive. This
wasn't quite sufficient, though. I was finally able to find / read the files by
first doing binary read attempts on these files with my file manager, which
succeeded, then resuming the installer from its error message in another window.
It was kind of like "Oh, yeah, so that's where it is," as far as the installer was
concerned. Having reached this point, I immediately burned the contents of each
disk to subdirectories on a CD. And I probably should do the same with all other
floppies here that may have any future importance.

I'd like to tell you all this effort led to a good result, but I'm still without
the OCR capability I had hoped to have in OS/2. OCR has been one of the real blind
spots for this platform. Supposedly, TextBridge was one of the best around, for
any platform. Unfortunately (leaving aside for the moment the issue of Twain
support), I can't even bring up the installed app. Can't get past "System Error.
Divide by Zero or Overflow Error. Failed to initialize ICRserver." Even worse,
this program had been installed and working in _real_ Win 3.1 (in my DOS
partition), but now the same result occurs there. I'm theorizing that some upgrade
along the way -- faster CPU, the Y2K-compliant version of PC-DOS -- may have killed
the ability of this program to function on my system. Come to think of it, I've
previously seen a very similar error message (the first part of it) from another
program, where it was confirmed to be a speed / timing problem, that could be cured
by a patch.

There used to be some utilities to slow down a CPU, though I don't know if any are
applicable to a P-II / 450. If so, I could test this theory.

Jordan