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Post by Leif Bloomquist on Jan 25, 2007 15:52:02 GMT -5
I trust these are still of interest?! brain, any chance you're reading the forum and/or your email?
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Post by nikoniko on Jan 26, 2007 16:45:20 GMT -5
Wow, what a neat find! It's great to see more pieces of Q-Link popping up.
That reminds me. I don't suppose anyone here would happen to have a copy of the Habitat beta or Club Caribe? I had started on a disassembly/re-engineering project some years ago, but met with disaster when literally every disk I owned was destroyed by water damage from a burst pipe. I still have some or most of my notes, though, and would love to get back to the study one of these days. I would especially love to have a copy of Habitat again, as I found it more interesting than what they turned it into with Club Caribe.
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Post by cloistermaximus on Jan 27, 2007 20:56:10 GMT -5
The Club Caribae disk is available on an old thread, and I have a copy as well if you can't find it. Good luck doing any disassembly on it though. It's a mess.
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Post by henrik51 on Jan 29, 2007 19:46:49 GMT -5
I have my PC all set up to image commie disks....if someone would want to send them to me, I would be happy to do it.
Anyone got a playnet disk, BTW? I'd love to play with that, too.
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murple
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Post by murple on Feb 10, 2007 1:54:09 GMT -5
I work at QLink (well, AOL, but I prefer to think of it as QLink haha) and there are still a small handful of employees from the 80s. Nobody I know personally, but they are around. I wonder if any of them have any old QStuff that hasnt been thrown out.
In the data center there's still lockers marked "Stratus parts" from the old Stratus servers QLink ran on.
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Post by Golan Klinger on Feb 10, 2007 2:11:35 GMT -5
murple: Please ask around if anyone has any old Q-Link related material (software or otherwise). Think of it as digital archaeology.
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murple
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Post by murple on Feb 10, 2007 2:16:01 GMT -5
There *is* some around, some of it was displayed at the company's 30 year anniversary party in 2005 (or so I was told, I was in San Francisco that week). As to whether any of that is in a place I can see it, thats another story.
I do think the Stratus hosts are still online somewhere though, in some capacity, though they no longer are a main part of the service. They might store billing info or something, I really dont know.
The old QLink building (no longer an AOL data center) is about a 5 minute drive from my home. I could probably go by and take a photo of it if anyone cares.
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Post by wiskow on Feb 10, 2007 14:03:40 GMT -5
The old QLink building (no longer an AOL data center) is about a 5 minute drive from my home. I could probably go by and take a photo of it if anyone cares. Yes! That'd be great to see! :-) -Andrew ___________________________________ Cottonwood BBS +1 (951) 242-3593 Open 24/7 at 300/1200/2400 baud hometown.aol.com/cottonwoodbbs
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Post by nikoniko on Feb 10, 2007 14:11:09 GMT -5
About a year after Q-Link stopped services, a new guy showed up at a local user group meeting and told us that he was in possession of the harddrives containing Q-Link's download archive. He said that AOL was going to throw them out, but his friend who worked there was able to save them. The drives were in a very sorry state, full of disk errors and needing a lot of work to salvage the remains, and he was looking for someone to help him with the project. Our resident harddrive guru, who worked for a data recovery service, wasn't there that night, so we asked him to please come again to the next meeting in two weeks so that we could get a pro involved on this important mission of preservation. A few people, including me, got the guy's e-mail address and phone number, but unfortunately not his full name, just "Jim". He didn't show at the next meeting, so I called and e-mailed but couldn't reach him. Finally a couple weeks later I got back a short e-mail that his job had relocated him to Ohio for a couple months and he was very busy, but that he'd be coming back soon and would be in touch again. Never heard anything from him again. Eventually e-mails started bouncing and after a while the phone number was disconnected, so I took it his relocation to Ohio ended up being permanent. Or perhaps he never had the harddrives to begin with, but it's hard to fathom why he would concoct such a story.
It's a shame not one of us at the meeting ever got his full name. Even his e-mail to me just had "Jim" in the name field. A while later when reverse phone lookup services popped up, it occurred to me that we probably could have learned his name from his phone number, but by that time none of us were still keeping his contact info since neither his phone or e-mail address worked anymore. If he really was in possession of those harddrives, then it's a great loss that he never followed through with his plan to rescue the data. I also feel somewhat personally responsible since we never got enough information from him to track him down. The only lead I have is that we remembered the first part of his e-mail address was "Zapp". On the slight chance that might be his last name, I've been running periodic searches for years now. Once I even paid $20 to get the unlisted phone numbers and addresses of a couple dozen people in the US with that name, but none of them panned out. I've also tried people whose names are similar, such as Zapponi and what not, but still no luck. For all I know, "Zapp" may have had nothing to do with his name. Maybe he was a fan of Zzap, and decided to double the P instead of the Z.
I can only hope that the drives are still out there somewhere, whether with Jim "Zapp" or someone else, and will surface one of these days. My worst fear is that their reprieve from the landfill was only temporary, and now they're lying buried somewhere unders tons of diapers and banana peels.
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murple
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Post by murple on Mar 15, 2007 0:40:08 GMT -5
I havent had time to go by and take a pic of the old QLink building, but I'll try to get to it this weekend if I can. I'm kind of curious what it is now... that particular area is full of car dealerships and generic office spaces nowadays.
AOL still has and as far as I know uses (in some totally different capacity) the old Stratus servers that QLink used to run on. There are lockers full of spare Stratus parts in a hallway near the NOC. I think the system is used in some limited internal capacity now, since almost all of the production AOL network is on Linux servers. No idea if there's any old tape backups of QLink stuff, but I do know that a year or two ago at AOL's big 25 or 30 year anniversary party, they were displaying Commodore 64s with QLink software as part of the festivities.
Theres a handful of old QLink staff still there, but I dont know any of them unfortunately, so I'm not even sure where to begin asking for info about that stuff.
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murple
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Post by murple on Mar 15, 2007 0:55:21 GMT -5
nikoniko:
QLink ran on 2 Stratus servers... I dont know much about mainframes, but I'm a bit skeptical that someone got their hands on the Stratus hard drives. For one thing, as I mentioned in my last post, AOL still uses those Stratus systems for something (no idea what, but nothing customer-facing... I'd probably guess something like internal billing, record keeping, or... who knows). Even if someone got its drives, I dont know if they'd be readable on a PC, or if it even uses "hard drives" in the same sense as a PC.
Now, its possible that QLink stored parts of its files on PCs or some sort of Unix servers or something... or that this guy had backups... or if the Stratus did have hard drives that can be used in a PC and the drives were replaced... I wasnt at AOL until 2002. So I won't go as far as to say "Jim" was full of "sh*t" but I also wouldn't get too worked up about missing some sort of opportunity to get the QLink archives based just on this story.
What you'd want to do would be to find some long term AOL employee who was around when QLink was still up and ask for any info or names of people who might have info. The holy grail would not be hard drives (which probably have been long since re-used or broken) but to find backup tapes from the old system. I wouldn't be too surprised if there are some old QLink backups somewhere in a locker. The questions then are... do these exist? Does someone have access to them who would make them available? Are they in a format that can be read by modern PCs (since AOL is unlikely to put them on its Stratus and make copies for random people).
Considering QLink's archives probably take up a pretty trivial amount of storage space by modern standards, I wouldn't be surprised if they were kept. I'd just be concerned that nobody is still around that knows where they are. Who knows.
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Post by nikoniko on Mar 26, 2007 20:09:05 GMT -5
Well, full of sh*t would probably explain his disappearance and the difficulty of keeping in touch with him. Or he may have had something which he thought or hoped might be what he claimed, in which case I could forgive his optimism. While Q-Link kept their servers, I would really be surprised if the main storage for the file archives was put in service for something else. I don't know if you were around in Q-Link's last years, but files in the download archives were being corrupted right and left. Sometimes whole sections would disappear, never to be brought back. The staff were apologetic that they would no longer spend any time restoring from backups, and warned that no steps would be taken to restore Q-Link should it take a serious dive. It was simply being allowed to die. Q-Link's structure was built to be fault-tolerant, but that only takes you so far without proper maintenance. I do wonder if they still have tape backups, though. I have to admit part of my interest is that their archive might hold some programs that I wrote and uploaded. I'd particularly like to find a Tempest clone I put together. I'm sure it was crap, as no copy of it seems to have made it onto the net and no one ever messaged me on the Q to say they liked it, but in my own mind at the time it was brilliant.
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murple
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Post by murple on Mar 28, 2007 0:04:07 GMT -5
I'm being transferred to the corporate headquarters at AOL. Im pretty upset about that for the most part because I'm just not compatible with the whole corporate workplace scene. I'm a techie. Techies and suit-wearers should not mix. But anyway...
The upside is that I'm more likely to run across longterm employees who were around for QLink while I'm there. So the odds of meeting someone that knows what happened to QLink's files probably are going to be much better.
Personally, by the time QLink was in its last days, I was long gone from it. By 1989/1990 I was off QLink because my parents refused to pay for it after they switched to using DOS, and "unauthorized" access was more hassle than it was worth by then. I was also bitter over Habitat. They told me I was chosen to be a Habitat beta tester, and then I never heard from them again about that. I was seeing reviews of Habitat in magazines, so, that kinda pissed me off. I dont remember when exactly I got on QLink last, but by the time they shut it down in the early 90s, I recall responding to the news with something like "wow, that was still up?" Also, I'd discovered the internet by like 1991 or 1992, and between BBSes and the internet, QLink was just a (mostly) fond memory.
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Post by Leif Bloomquist on Mar 31, 2007 19:06:53 GMT -5
Update: I was at Jim Butterfield's place this afternoon and took D64 images of the relevant disks. The D64s have been emailed to Jim Brain for analysis.
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murple
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Post by murple on Apr 2, 2007 17:43:19 GMT -5
Hows about putting them out for other folks to analyze too
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