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When I was at my parents' place this weekend, I found a big stack of old 5.25" floppy disks. Browsing through them a bit, I found a disk with my very first GWBASIC programs on it.

Now I had one problem: I didn't have a 5.25" floppy drive. Luckily, my dad likes to collect lots of old stuff and he had a non-booting IBM Portable PC (with a 5.25" drive!) lying around. So after an afternoon of unscrewing parts that were never meant to be unscrewed (especially not after 20 years), I went home with a floppy drive.

Back home I tried to connect the drive to one of my PCs. This can be hard, especially if you're using the wrong cables. After a day of switching cables and jumpers (the floppy drive is so old that it has DS0-DS4 jumpers!) my PC finally booted again (picky Compaq BIOS, sigh).

So now I have a disk image of my very first programs (1990-1994), and separate copies of the .BAS files (most of them converted to ASCII), but I'm wondering about the best way to put them online. In the original tree? A zip-file with the original directory tree? And how about the 'non-free' parts? (some of those very first programs I made just called external programs, made by other people)