880

There is a file called 880.rar, and for two weeks I was fairly certain it no longer existed. It comes up in a thread on phantom.sannata.org, mentioned the way people mention things to each other and not to posterity: somebody had disk images off an Iskra-226, somebody else put them up, here is the link. The link points at oldpc.su. oldpc.su does not answer, and has not for years.

What answers is a crawler that came past in 2016 and took a copy because that is what it does, not because anyone decided this mattered. That snapshot is the only copy I can find of six disk sides from a machine nobody emulates. Most of what I do at a desk is argue that the record is not neutral, that it keeps some people and drops others. Here is the record failing to be neutral in my favor for once, by pure accident, and I am not going to pretend I earned it. I downloaded it twice.

Two people made it. vazman had the physical disks, actual disks, in an actual apartment. dk_spb read them out and posted the result. I do not know either of them. Not their names, not their cities, not whether they still read that forum. Between them they did the single most expensive part of this whole undertaking, the part I could not do in Kyiv with two weeks and an appointment, and they did it for a thread. Their handles go in the repo, in a file I wrote today, because credit that costs me nothing is the only kind I can pay.

And this is what six foreign disks are for. My own file cannot tell me whether I am reading it right. It is one stream off one disk, and if my assumption about the format is wrong it will still hand me something, and that something will look almost plausible, and I will believe it for a month. Sides that came from somewhere else are the only way to be wrong out loud. If one reading opens all six, the reading is not a coincidence.

Commit message from the second of June, nine in the evening: 880.rar exists after all. It is the only line in this repo so far that sounds relieved.