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Sad news: Chuck(G)

I was inactive here for a couple years before returning this year but I'm still greatly saddened by ChuckG's passing.
He was welcoming to folks joining the forums, even me, back when I had recently started posting.
I looked through some of his postings after seeing this thread and man, a lot of it goes over my head!
From what I've read in this thread he was a pillar of the community and his loss will be felt for a long time to come.
I wish I'd gotten to know him better, but I enjoyed what interaction we did have.
Cheers to a grand tinkerer and lost media wizard, long may he be remembered!
 
Haven't posted anything here in a while, but this is very sad and depressing news to read of Chuck's passing.

During my active years on these forums, it was an absolute kernel-level privilege to be educated and inspired by this brilliant man.

Rest in paradise Chuck.
 
I just heard about this.

It goes without saying that this is really sad news. He's been a fixture here forever and had a wealth of knowledge in this field that I'm not sure anyone can match. He'd likely forgotten more about vintage computers and tech than most of us ever knew to begin with. He was a good guy to boot.

Rest in peace, Chuck. You'll be missed!
 
I have been away for a while, and when I logged in and started looking
at the responses, I found a vacuum..... Chuck(G) was absent!
I always called him "the great master" in my posts as an appreciation of
his knowledge and status. Hopefully, his teachings would be available
online and he would become immortal!

RIP great master....

ziloo
 
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I just found out about his passing today. I never met him, but he seemed like a great guy! I only found out as I would refer people that needed data recovery to him. They must have done a search and found this forum post.

The VCF museum has limited capabilities for recovering and accessing data, so when we can't do it we like to refer them to someone else that is set up to do this as business.

Are there other recommendations for people that anyone can recommend?
 
I suggested someone younger should take up his equipment that his nephew was offering.
The working 7-track equipment needs to be put into someone's hands to continue offering recovery service.

I'm going through setting up TK50 tape recovery again because I can't find anyone outside willing
to do it.

When I saw pictures of his lab, I was surprised at how little there was there.
 
Even if you had the equipment, you still need to know how to prep the media from shedding and the software used to dump and more importantly analyze what you dumped. The sad thing is most of the tools he used for working with data backup was in his head, knowing different formatting and deciphering what backup software was used.
 
Sadly that "Time in Life to Move on", when it come to all of us, is the one Life's factor that's Binary. One minute your a One and then your a Zero.

However Everyone of us living, touches and interacts with Everything around us, in an infinite number of way, that most of us never stop to appreciate.

From my experiences with Chuck, this interaction was always Great !

Chuck helped me numerous times on CPM formats and with my Sirus Disks.

He will definitely be missed. RIP Chuck !
 
Unknown_K said:
Even if you had the equipment, you still need to know how to prep the media from shedding and the software used to dump and more importantly analyze what you dumped. The sad thing is most of the tools he used for working with data backup was in his head, knowing different formatting and deciphering what backup software was used.
Click to expand...

That knowledge definitely isn't being archived in an organized fashion. The professional "Software Preservation Network"
people can barely deal with PCs.
My retirement is nearing, and it doesn't sound like they will be hiring a replacement for me at CHM
which is why I've been thinking a lot about how much generational knowledge is going to be lost.
 
SomeGuy said:
Chuck had experience with an incredible number of formats and media types. As someone who has derped through a number of oddball floppy disk formats, I can appreciate that, and that much of that knowledge and experience is now gone.
Click to expand...
I just found this thread today. We've suffered a profound loss.

I actually interacted with him a bit "back in the day". He'd invented a new disk format for the Durango F85. It used a pair of Micropolis 100TPI 5.25" floppies (already a bit unusual compared to the rest of the world) and his driver used GCR format on them when the rest of the world was using FM or MFM. I believe that was the first production 5.25" floppy subsystem to break the 1MByte/drive barrier.

He sent me a driver for a forthcoming F85 hard disk subsystem. I think he was leaving Durango at that time. He sent it with a comment something like "I haven't tested this since there was no hardware when I wrote it, but I think it should work". Maybe 6 months later an early sample of the hard drive arrived and I tried assembling the driver in preparation for merging it into the CP/M BIOS. The assembler threw an error - there was a typo in his driver source. He created a disk driver, from scratch, in an editor and never actually assembled it. After fixing the typo, the driver worked perfectly and we shipped it unmodified, except for the Lifeboat shim that turned hard disk drivers into loadable modules. He did all that work from preliminary design documents, never even tried to assemble it, and it worked perfectly.

Many years later I saw a post here from "ChuckG" and messaged the poster and said "You wouldn't happen to be Chuck Guzis by any chance, would you?" and he replied and said he was, and we had a brief but deep exchange of messages about what we'd been up to.

:cry:
 
I'm sorry to hear about Chuck. He had a huge impact on my life.
Back in 1987 I was a senior in high school. My family had a computer store and we were selling PC clones (Leading Edge), and most people could only afford monochrome monitors.
The problem was, most "fun" software (games, Print Shop, etc) required a CGA card and color monitor. I found Chuck's program, Sim-CGA, on a download site. It was a TSR that emulated a CGA card using a Hercules monochome adapter.

I called up Chuck - his phone number came with the software! - and asked if he'd like to go into business selling it. What must he have thought getting a call from some young 17-year-old?!
He said "How about we go 50-50?" and my company (Excelsior Software) was born. Chuck kept improving Sim-CGA over the freeware version. I worked on all the packaging, sales, and distribution. We had the #1 selling PC ultility in the country for almost a year.

I was copying all the floppies myself in my parent's store. At one point I suggested to Chuck "Can't we make copying quicker by reading the disk image into memory and just writing it over and over?" After maybe a weekend Chuck sent me a new program he wrote called "Copy QM" (Copy Quick/Multiple) which did exactly that. What an improvement!

Chuck knew hardware cold. He was an amazing developer. I was already on a course to go to college for Comp Sci, and Chuck was a great role model.
When I saw companies like Quaterdeck selling an Expanded Memory Emulator (PC's came with "Extended Memory", EMS was a different standard) I mentioned it to Chuck. He wrote his own EMS emulator which we sold as "Sim-EMS" for only $24.95.

Sim-CGA and Sim-EMS helped me pay my way through college (plus working weekends and summers in my parents' Software City).

At one point, Chuck told me he went to college at Purdue. He strongly suggested I look at U Penn for Comp Sci, but I had to stay closer to home (Univ of Scranton) because of my family's store.
However, I never forgot about Purdue. If it could produce a Chuck Guzis, it must be a great school.

Fast forward ~5 years ago when my younder daugher was looking at colleges. I remembered Chuck & Purdue and we went to check it out. She wound up attending as a double (honors) major in Comp Sci and Data Science. After a great college experience, she is starting her first job (at Nvidia!) this February. If it weren't for Chuck, we never would have even looked at Purdue.

We fell out of touch over the years after he moved, but I did try (unsuccessfully) to re-connect when my younger daughter started college. I'm sorry I couldn't tell him about the continued positive impact he had on my life.

One other quick story: Chuck impressed upon me that knowing the hardware was just as important as the software (he's probably why I've also branched off into collecting and restoring old computers, pinball, and arcade machines). I had an Atari ST once and was complaining to Chuck about how expensive hard drives were. He reverse-enginereed his own SCSI adapter and wrote his own driver software and sent me one. It seemed like there was nothing he couldn't do if we put his mind to it.
 
I was up in the attic this weekend and I found a few artifacts from my partnership with Chuck. Here are pics of the 3 different packages for Sim-CGA (as we sold more copies, we were able to make improvements). Also a beaten-up copy of Sim-EMS. And I found something else I had completely forgotten about. Chuck was playing around with his own printer drivers. He was basically using over-printing and some other fine stepper motor adjustments to get incredibly sharp quality from a 9-pin printer. We were going to call it "Sim-Daisy" b/c you got near daisy-wheel printer quality from cheap Okidata, ec printers. Alas, we never did release that. I'm not sure if Chuck ever had any projects sold at retail besides Sim-CGA and Sim-EMS.
IMG_1449_s.jpeg
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Haha, nifty =^_^= Now I'm curious, though - the phrasing of the ad copy seems to imply that there was a use case for this running CGA software on an EGA? Was that specifically using an EGA to drive an MDA/HGC-type monitor, with sync limitations preventing the use of CGA modes...?
 
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