ScuzzBlog: Diaries June 2026
Entry 15th June 2026: Post 1: The Physical 3D - Beyond sight and sound.
The Physical 3D - Beyond sight and sound.
Continuing with my blogs regarding disk restoration and retro
data management , old skool, I move today to a whole hard drive
in need of disk restoration and rebuilding.
I spent the day rebuilding a busted partition on an Amiga 1200. I
made the mistake of copying way too much across from a ZIP drive
and the thing locked up and sadly threw out a nasty checksum error
to the drive. What this meant is I couldn't edit anything on that
partition.
OK.. No biggy. I have all my records and zip copies of files so I
traversed the wooden hill to the workshop and fired up the A1200
down there with all the various drives. Man do I love firing up my
most treasured Amiga 1200. First I plug in the ZIP drive, then I
switch on the Microvitec. Next up I have to switch on two external
SCSI drives and an SCSI CDROM drive.
The ECHO on the startup reels through the endless lines of script
as the Amiga 1200 kicks into life. I am soon clicking away at files
and transferring items over to the backup ZIP. Some of the files
are on floppy and high density disks to boot.
It was a lot of work to reinstate around 100MB of data... WAIT !
Is that right 100MB of data. Actually closer to 150MB with stuff
I copied direct to the drive but the back up ZIP was 100MB.
Question ? Why bother ? The answer is more deep than you can imagine.
First up I love computers. My love affair extends to all things
that are physical, tangible, three dimensional that can be touched
and sensed beyond sight and vision. I cannot express into words the
joy I get from experiencing the three dimensional retro world that
I populate. I am never simply living on a screen to a computer. I
am in the very space around my kit and get such a thrill from seeing
and witnessing it all coming to life at my command.
I am aware that such things can be emulated on the smallest devices
today and you don't even have to get up out the chair. But where is
the thrill in that, given that your experiences are but the actions
of a sterile , sanitised kinda process where all the physical has
been filtered out to simple visual and sound stimuli.
I found the matrix a very very long time ago, decades before the
concept of the red and blue pill. I dived headlong down the rabbit
hole long before man had even landed on the moon. I discovered the
power of imagination and the thirst to feed it. This always entailed
the use of 'stuff' to enjoy what I wanted and I never disconnected
myself from the value of 'stuff' and why it is such an essential part
of the process.
It follows that I do not deal with simulation when there is a real
physical solution to be enjoyed. I reside in my retro world cus
it gives me endless possibilities and rich veins of tech stuff to
tinker with. I seek out new challenges each day and then set too
trying to resolve them. Tonight I am rested from my days toil in
building my partition. I was not happy until I had succeeded. In
doing so I spent a good time with my beloved A1200s and reflected
on the decades I have spent maintaining and looking after the kit.
As I placed the A1200 under the dust cover before closing down I
made comment to my beloved friend.. ' Thank you. You never let
me down '.
The Physical 3D - Beyond sight and sound.
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