[Gllug] Someone with a postcode database do me a favour (M.Blackmore)

[Christopher Currie]

On Sun, 25 May 2008 21:44:13 +0100 "M.Blackmore" <mblackmore at oxlug.org>  
wrote:
>I can't seem to find it now on my hard disk,
> sure I saved it somewhere... perhaps a job, finally, for Beagle to do
> for me! Never used beagle before. Trouble is it might be in the old
> Amipro word processor format, or even before that in Wordperfect, or
> Wordstar, or PCWrite (still my favourite word processor that old
> shareware dos program - anyone remember it?) or even perhaps in that
> superb but market stillborn freeform database called Idealist (a tragic
> loss to computerdom that was, so much could have flowed from it), so I
> wonder if those saved anything in any recognisable plain text format
> within their file formats 

> I've been meaning to pull my various postgrad courses stuff and notes
> etc. off that sort of obsolete format into something like opendoc (darn,
> whats that called now, the ratified standard, xml?) or a pdf file for
> years, while I've still got a computer that can run dos/win95 available!
> I'm not sure if I've even got a dos disk anymore ... and if I do heaven
> knows how long a floppy lasts as readable...

No need to. In principle, you shouldn't change data into a new format (far too 
often there's an information loss), just get an emulator that runs old 
software. Once you've achieved that, it should be possible to keep it going 
indefinitely.. I call it Cumulative Computing (as opposed to Destructive 
Computing, which throws still-useful things away).

Wordstar's Non-doc format is ASCII. VDE (freeware as I recall ) would produce 
an intermediate ASCII format with wordwrap but presumably some intrusive 
line-end code too. Which version of WS did you use? On this box I can (in 
principle) run 3.0 and 3.3 under CP/M, 4.0 and 6.x under DOS, though my WS6 
installation is pretty broken despite having the disks - I think they're all 
5 1/4".

Bekon Idealist32 seems very well behaved under Wine. It'll export in 
comma-delimited or tab-delimited format, and also in 'formatted' formats 
though that's trickier.

DosBox is so good now (e.g. 0.72) that you can easily run Windows 3.1x over 
it, if you have a licensed copy, and you can run Blackwell Idealist under 
that.  OpenGem is quite usable.

FreeDOS and other public-domain DOS system floppies are available on the Web 
from various sources, and it's not too difficult to make a bootable DOS USB 
stick with W95-compatible DOS on it (I've had less success in getting W95 
itself to boot from a stick, though it's certainly possible).

I've not been able to get a very useful FreeDOS VM under VMplayer, though.

On Sun, 25 May 2008 23:31:58   "M.Blackmore" <mblackmore at oxlug.org> wrote 
further:

>(and I consider selling out to foreign corporations de
>facto treason). 

>I notice the green chameleon rhetoric has disappeared.

They've sold it out to Novell, haven't they? I still have a copy of the 
chameleon here somewhere:-)

Christopher

-- 
Christopher Currie
ccurrie at usa.net

Murphy is the Prince of This World.

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