ImageDisk project is canceled

[Jim Battle]

Dave Dunfield wrote:
...
> I've had enough, and I don't need this crap.
> Effective immediately, I have cancled the ImageDisk project. My offer to
> make the source code available by request is hereby withdrawn. I have
> removed the images section from my site. If you have copies of any of this
> material, I would respectfully ask you to please delete them, or at least not
> make my material available. I want this program to have never existed.

This is bad news, and I hope Dave reconsiders.  I'm disappointed he let the 
irritating few get under his skin, and I'm sure those appreciative of his 
efforts far outnumber those who were critical.

After Don Maslin's death and the apparent loss of his collection of disks and 
images, there was a lot of group discussion of how to go about collecting such a 
library again and this time using a format that wasn't so obscure as teledisk 
(which was I'm sure motivated by goals, such as compactness, that aren't a 
constraint for pure archival) and that was maintained.  That was replaced by the 
sound of crickets, then Dave went and did something about it.  Not only did he 
write the software, he had a good start on many boot disks that are not 
available anywhere else (that I'm aware of anyway).

I've invested some effort, certainly not nearly as much as Dave, in archiving 
50-100 different disks using his tools (for machines as diverse as northstar, 
sol, wang, sage, bondwell), and I've convinced a few others to use them as well. 
  Some of my machine web pages have IMD images on them.  It will take me some 
time to keep offering the bits but without the IMD-ness.  I guess the best I can 
do at this point is convert the disk images to raw sector dumps.

So maybe we can hope that that open source disk archiver project will now move 
forward that Dave's simple and documented format is no longer somehow hindering 
its development.  To that end, I'd like a pointer to it to see if it will work 
for me.  If it isn't online that means either the program is just someone's idle 
thought (in which case, get in line behind the million other good things to work 
on "when I have the time"), or it is, uh, an unpublished open source program. 
Like Dave's.  But unproven.

Not being a big drinker, I'm going to have to go find an old databook or BIOS 
listing to console myself.


As long as I'm posting, I might as well mention that this past weekend I scanned 
about 45 datasheets, ads, and a few larger documents and put them up on my Wang 
2200 documents page.  I also posted about a dozen other similar types of 
documents that Paul Heller scanned and sent.

List of newly uploaded files:
	http://www.thebattles.net/wang/whats_new.html

The page with all of the docs:
	http://www.thebattles.net/wang/docs.html