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At work we have an IBM Optical Storage 3995 with 4 drives and worm (write once read many) medias.
The storage ist mote then 12 years old and is controlled by an old 486er PC with OS/2 Warp 3. Now the time is come to migrate the data to an storage where it is easier to read. The greates problem is, that in the early 90ies no filesystem for optical media exists and IBM extended his own HPFS Filesystem (high performance filesystem) with features for optical media. HPOFS was born (high performance optical file system). The bad news now is, that HPFS, which is readable by many operation systems (eg. Linux), is incompatible to HPOFS and vice versa. UDF was developed later and is used until today as filesystem for optical devices.
The only two systems who are able to read this file system are OS/2 and i5OS (the operationg system for AS400 mainframes). Now we are trying to copy the data (afp files) to an alternate storage. But there are serveral problems.
First of all only a special program on the OS/2 computer can control the storage. Linux is able to find the robotic and the worm drives but I have no idea how i could control this black monster. I got a /dev/sch0 device file but how should i control it?
So it seams like that without the OS/2 PC it will be impossible to fetch the data from the worms. Now the OS/2 version is Warp3 dated back in 1993!
To make things more funny, no ethernet in the box only tokenring At least the ftp client from OS/2 can not put file recursive so we have to implement a script in REXX. Oh for you information, this is a better QBasic (also dated back in 1993).
I hope it is possible for me to post some picture of this historical example of hardware. If we have success to get the data I will let you know.