Elara S. Novikova
880

The blank side

One side of one disk in this set was never given a job. 256,256 bytes, all of them zero: no catalog, no header, not a stray byte left over from a formatting pass. The tool that inventories the other five prints a single line for this one, and that line is the entire finding.

bytes
256,256, all zero
sectors in use
0 of 1001
catalog entries
0
file header sectors
0

No picture. 256,256 zero bytes. The side was never written to and there is nothing on it to read, which is worth saying out loud, because of the six sides this is the one whose emptiness is the whole of what it has to say.

The image, 256,256 bytes

Never written, not erased

Deleting a file on this machine does not remove it. The catalog entry stays, the name stays, and one status byte changes, which is why disk2side1 still shows a scratched program called СПИСОК in its index, sectors 778 to 781, legible forty years later. A side that had been used and then cleared would keep its index header in sector 0 and the names of whatever had been on it. This one keeps nothing. There is no catalog to scratch and nothing to recover, and the difference between a cleared side and an untouched one is exactly the difference between those two states.

An empty side is evidence too

A quarter of a megabyte, on a machine where the entire BAM database suite fits into 887 sectors and a payroll system into 813. The three disks in this set did their work with five sides and left the sixth alone. Somebody had this space for years and never once needed it, which tells you something about how much software an office like that actually kept, and I would rather record that than quietly drop the file for having nothing in it. A survey that only lists what is present has already decided what counts.

Where the bytes come from

The archive is 880.rar, published on oldpc.su by the forum user vazman, who owned the physical disks. dk_spb read them and made the images. The thread is on phantom.sannata.org and dates from 2016. The download link is dead; the copy I work from came out of a Wayback snapshot from that year, and as far as I can establish it is the only one left anywhere. This side came with it, all 256,256 bytes of it, and I keep it in the repository with the other five.

What I checked

The disk toolkit reports 256,256 bytes and 100.0 % zero. Both sector readings agree: 1001 logical sectors of 256 bytes, 2002 physical of 128, and not one of them carries a set bit.

What this does not show

What is proven is that the image is all zeros. How the disks were read is documented nowhere, not in the forum thread and not by the people who made the images, so a side the drive could not read at all would arrive looking the same as a side that was never written. Nothing in the archive settles that, and the only person who can is the one who did the dumping.

Where to read more

Back to the six sides