TFA says that cows walk around 8 hours a day grazing anyway.

Let's get to the more important questions: What impact does all that captive exercise have on the tasty dairy and beef products so critical to maintaining our waistlines and thickening our arteries?

If it makes the beef even better and generates power, it's a total win.

(With unheartfelt apologies to the veg types in the crowd).

Ah, the Altos systems. 8800 series, then 486, then 586. They used up numbers years before Intel got to them (the Altos 486 had an Intel 80186 in it, and 4 serial ports). Often paired with Wyse terminals. Anybody else remember "business basic"?

It's almost certainly an ST506 drive; you will be very hard pressed to connect it to a PCI era system; probably can only get as far as AT bus machine.

In any case, if you do manage to image the drive, the filesystem will be based on either Unix version 7, Unix System V, or the Berkeley Fast File System. It wasn't until Linux rolled along that we started to seriously fork into lots of file system variants. It's most likely the basic System V file system, which is well documented, and pretty simple stuff.

The posters above are correct, however. You really should try the serial port approach first. I'd go for cu over uucp - getting uucp running can be quite an exercise in itself. And you'll want either tar or cpio; probably tar, but watchout for version and format incompatibilities there as well.

You can also just cat the data out a serial port, and capture it as a session log on the other end. That's likely to be the easiest solution, and perhaps more reliable than any other.

You haven't said what the nature of the data is, but after this much time laying dormant, you are likely to have substantial challenges at the application level interpreting the data as well.

Right direction, but not far enough. I'm thinking that custom made tuxedos are the way to go here, with company paid dry cleaning. Of course, each employee is going to need a closet full, ala Men in Black.

As a bonus, on bad days you can pretend you're in the Matrix.

I suppose now we'll all wear parkas and cram energy bars during our kernel compiles?

Anyone know the cost per KWH of corn syrup?