Doug Grinbergs
Spike 
Here's a quick post about the practice of media archaeology and a piece of the history of a prominent #BBS.
The @mediaarchaeologylab has a box that was donated that used to be the controller for a BBS called The Thing. It ran DOS and had a physical telephone line adapter called an IPAD (not to be confused with the Apple device) that allowed up to 16 people at a time to dial in to the BBS, which was running a commercial BBS software called TBBS.
This BBS was and still remains an important piece of the history of BBSes, because it was mainly populated by artists based in New York in the late 90s. There is still a website (https://thing.net/) though it looks like it hasn't been updated in a while.
I've been trying to get this box online for a while - since the Before Times - but the hard drive (a whopping 425MB) has been...uncooperative. I've previously tried to use a number of IDE interface tools to mount the drive or image it, but the platters seem not to like it very much.
Well, yesterday I brought in a device that I've owned for years but never used. It's called a Logicube Forensic MD5. It's a standalone device designed to create forensically-valid clones of hard drives and their files for law enforcement investigators that they can use to demonstrate chain of custody. This model was designed for IDE/ATA hard drives, the generation this DOS box used. I've had it in a storage closet for going on 20 years and decided to bust it out.
And you know what? This thing WORKS GREAT. It made a drive image using onboard dd which I was able to mount in other tools. It did this in minutes. From what it looks like, the entire filesystem is intact. Not only was it loaded with an unreleased beta version of the IPAD software, it seems to have a lot of BBS files stored on it that bear scrutiny. The system seems to have last booted up in 1998, so many of these files haven't seen the light of day in nearly a quarter century.
And now...the real work begins on looking through those files to see what we can learn about this important piece of history.
