AKiCiF: Tech help

[rolanni]

O, Internets, I have a disk.

It is an old disk, designed to be read by one of those ancient, how-do-you-say, DeeOeS computers. It is, this disk, of the 3.5 inch persuasion.

The label on the disk is: Medias Res Chapters 1-44 DOS

I strongly suspect that the files on this disk were written in WordStar. For DOS. Just to be clear.

Is there any way, O, Internets, to recover these files?

Is there any affordable way to recover these files?

Why do I ask?

I'll tell you.

Once upon a time there was a book being written about two characters named Val Con and Miri, and that book was called Medias Res, because we couldn't think of a title. Sort of like George. That book eventually became better-known, if not notorious, as Carpe Diem.

But! There was also another book, about these two people, Miri and Val Con, also entitled Medias Res, for exactly the reason elucidated above -- and it was abandoned.

It is possible, but not certain, that the files on this so-ancient disk, are the abandoned book.

It is equally possible that the files belong to the book which later became Carpe Diem.

It is also possible, in fact, likely, that the media has degraded past the point of usefulness. These files -- for either book -- would have been created in...1987/1988.

Thank you, O, Internets, for the gift of your expertise.

Comments

[sraun]

IIRC, WordStar for DOS was an ASCII mark-up format. If you're willing to deal with the clean-up, you can probably tell MSWord to open them as "recover text", and have unformatted (no bold, italic, etc.) text.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Or even in Wordpad (not Notepad, that doesn't handle ends of lines decently and some versions of Wordstar used plain newline instead of DOS CRLF). But there are Wordstar to whatever converters around, it's not difficult to convert to just recover the text and simple formatting (bold/italic/underline and paragraph separation), I've probably still got a couple I wrote years ago lying around as source (probably need to be updated before they'll compile but that's pretty trivial).