[Geysers] Data from early GPS survey unearthed

[Lucille Reilly]

I have an Old Mac with a "superdrive" that reads both 800k and 1.4MB floppies.  I have NO time to mess with conversions if this will work, but anyone in the metro Denver area who is interested is welcome to try, and I'll feed you lunch!  I transferred a 160-page book I'd written from Mac to PC format in about ten minutes.

Write me offlist.  Then I'll find out if the thing still works!  Haven't booted it in years.  I don't think I have any floppies here to test.

Lucille Reilly
Aurora, CO (near the Fitz hospitals)


-----Original Message-----
From: geysers-bounces at lists.wallawalla.edu [mailto:geysers-bounces at lists.wallawalla.edu] On Behalf Of Mike O'Brien
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2015 10:14 AM
To: Geyser Observation Reports
Subject: Re: [Geysers] Data from early GPS survey unearthed

In answer to a number of inquiries, the 50 backup floppies are 3.5” floppies that were created with Colorado Backup.  I don’t know which version, and from what I read in various forums via Google, later versions of Colorado Backup were unable to read backups made with earlier versions.  So whoever reads them will probably have to point various version at the disks until one of them works.  Certainly no current software will read any version of Colorado Backup’s format.

There’s also the likely problem of the media having aged out.

Mike O’Brien

> On Nov 3, 2015, at 8:37 AM, David Monteith <dmonteit at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> Mike:
> 
> Do you know what software was used for the backup?  Are the disks 3.5 
> or 5.25?
> 
> Dave
> 
>  On Sun, 2015-11-01 at 15:25 -0800, Mike O'Brien wrote:
>> A little history: back in 1993, I made shameless use of my position 
>> as a magazine columnist at the time to inveigle Trimble Navigation 
>> into loaning the NPS about $20,000 worth of survey-grade GPS gear.  
>> Rick Hutchinson, myself, and a bunch of my friends spent a couple of 
>> weeks touring around the near back country doing a GPS survey of 
>> places like the River Group, the Kaleidoscope area and the Sprinkler 
>> Group.
>> 
>> After Rick’s death, no one was able to turn up the data files from 
>> that survey.  I’ve got them on about 50 floppy disks, in a backup 
>> format that can’t be read by any current software, so no joy there.
>> 
>> However, in clearing out a storage room, I came across a manila 
>> folder with a bunch of hand-written tables of the reduced survey 
>> data, giving the differentially corrected locations of a whole bunch 
>> of features, together with some rough, hand-drawn sketch maps showing 
>> the features that were surveyed.
>> 
>> I’m not sure who would most benefit from this data.  I’m looking for 
>> suggestions as to whom I should send it to.
>> 
>> Mike O'Brien
>> _______________________________________________
>> Geysers mailing list
>> Geysers at lists.wallawalla.edu
>> 

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