Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

It also could be where the disks were stored. This set shipped from New Jersey, & nothing indicates it was anything other than new-old stock that spent virtually its entire life there. I got several other boxes from Utah with PC-XT disks in them, & there wasn't any visible damage.

Lightly related, here's an hour of someone playing a great game better than the Pac-Man Atari eventually released, which Atari sued out of the market for vaguely resembling Pac-Man, K.C. Munchkin: https://youtu.be/zwhf9pL9COo

The video is all game; no letterbox, tiles, cut-to-player, or picture-in-picture, but I was inclined to turn down the volume after a few minutes.

Atari Age is selling cartriges of what Pac-Man should have been: https://atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAYuBcuvIww

My expectations were defeated at a pretty young age. Here's an Atari 2600 Pac-Man commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m15geAyLtVI

Is English the only language in which we buy a liquid called gas (for driving) & in which we buy a gas called liquid (for heating & cooking)?

Well, that's it. The heads look good & clean, & they're on right, all the cables are firmly seated right, the belt's having no trouble turning the spindle, & all but one of the boot disks I tried are good & readable. I changed drives & moved the belt to it, & same thing. The computer's just refusing to boot.

Make backups, folks! Here's softing Microfuck's instructions: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17143/windows-10-back-up-your-files

How, exactly, does the most powerful Micro[computer]-Soft[ware] company in the world let a major update release to the general public with the side effect of

DELETE

FUCKING

EVERYTHING

in the locations they've spent the last 20+ years telling everyone to use!?

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/10/05/avoid-windows-10-october-update-until-you-do-one-thing/#7c2962373e79

- https://twitter.com/coolKevinator/status/1047714803127476225

- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-files/windows-10-october-2018-update-version-1809/1a924008-ddba-48db-a96f-7b4bfef9039a

- https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-october-update-problems-wiped-docs-plus-intel-driver-warning/

I got the belt back, but they sanded the new belt down to the correct width instead of replacing it. Eh, whatever works.

I installed it in one of my bad-belt floppy drives, and it's actually grabbing the spindle enough to grab the metal hub & spin the mylar disc! Progress!

But the drive isn't reading any of my boot disks. Bummer. Next step: Check the heads & hope I didn't break one.
💾

If you're able to pry off the LRFs (Little Rubber Feet) without dirtying or damaging the sticky stuff & without leaving any sticky stuff behind, you can use a clean backing sheet for stickers or peel-off stick-on labels to keep the LRFs clean & easy to peel off when it comes time to put them back on the computer.

Make sure to peel off any sticker chaff first if you use a sticker sheet. You don't want to stick the LRFs to any sticker parts, only backing parts.

Life-Hecker

The lesson I took away from that mistake was to write-protect the source disk before thinking of starting a copy.

That force of habit is still with me today. If I format, image, or copy anything & have more than one SD card involved (including micro-SDs in SD dongles), I flip the tab to "Lock" on the source card.

The worst computer mistake I ever made was on my C64, way back when I had only one floppy drive. I wanted to make a backup copy of a disk, & the disk copying program I was using had to format the backup first. It was halfway done with the format phase when I realized I was holding the blank floppy in my hand and that the disk I wanted to copy was being formatted.

This is in my ~/.shrc on BSD to keep me from accidentally nuking or clobbering files I forget are there:

alias cp='cp -ip'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias rm='rm -i'

This also works in ~/.bashrc for bash, & with GNU versions of cp (except `cp -p` preserves different file attributes), mv, & rm.