Processing a gigabyte of data (#E23)
Processing a gigabyte of work data…at home.
So?
Everybody had log files of mundane server daemons that spilled over, what’s the big news on a gig of data?
Will he post pics of tiny USB drives and say “look what I found”?
Yeah. Kinda.
At work, we’re preparing to move to a new building, purpose-built to our specs. We’ve been in the old one for like 30+ years and there are still plenty of coworkers that started at this era. It won’t be as pretty as the current one and it absolutely will not have a view like this (horses not included during winter) – but it will feature enough space for offices and production areas.
So naturally, dusty, long-forgotten stuff gets thrown out before someone boxes it up and moves it to the new building for it to gather dust again.
This is the smallest USB thumbdrive that I personally own (and bought), I think I still got the bill somewhere but I cannot remember the exact price. Should be in the region of 50 to 80 bucks, though. Has to be pre-2007, more like 2005 or even sooner.
128MB of pure “I have no proper internet connection at home, but I can download stuff at school” memory:
8 of these make a gigabyte, sort-of.
This is what got thrown out, it was in use as a boot drive for our machine controller PCs that download their realtime OS via TFTP, so they just need a very basic setup to do so. A 32MB disk-on-module (DOM) is perfectly fine for that task:
32 of these are needed for a gigabyte.
And this is a gigabyte (almost wrote “terabyte”…whew) of data that I just finished processing at my leisure:
1.44 MB 3.5″, 1.2M 5.25″, 720K, 360K, 180K, and tons of ugly special formats like 680K and 640K with shorter tracks across the entire disk or different formats on the very first ones. IBM, Amiga, some HP Vectra, Amstrad, OS9, you name it. Quite a few are just TAR archives without surrounding file/disk format. My Greaseweazle eats ’em all, yet gddrescue (encapsulated in a tiny bash script) is way more convenient to use if it is a standard IBM format.
And that doesn’t even include the lost tapes that existed until last week but had no suitable recorder device for it, let alone suitable software to decode that magnetic garbage…
…but I got a computer with a 8″ floppy disk drive to read the remaining, untouched 8″ ones 
