The 3" format disks mentioned in the article where "common" in the UK on the Spectrum +3 (which had a built in floppy drive), I owned one at one point.
The lore is that the world was moving to 3.5 and Alan Sugar (who owned Spectrum brand later after Amstrad bought them out) got a huge job lot of drives and disks cheap so they used them for the +3 as well as the existing CPC systems that had them (in fact the +3 used a modified version of AMDOS which ran the drives on the CPC).
It wasn't a terrible spectrum but it was already very obsolete by the time it was released.
Nothing on the level of Stephen Hawking's notes, but I handed off a decent sized stack of early Mac floppies to some "archivists" at a recent vintage computer festival. I understand there was a commercial game or two in the mix that had not yet been archived from the original floppy (on Macintosh Garden or archive.org).
I'm not sure what else was there that they'll find interesting. Maybe they'll let me know.
I worked in a Mac lab briefly in college and we ran Disinfectant from time to time on the lab machines. Sometimes we would find Mac viruses infecting a file or two and I collected a few of these on a floppy. The archivist seemed delighted to have a few disks with "contained" Mac viruses as well.
Oh Nice, I tried to submit this but never got on to the front page.
We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum. Which is really just a life time of a person. Stored well and right paper could out last all of our digital alternatives. The M-DISC is expensive per GB, and I think they went bankrupt in 2020, and BlueRay disc is too small in capacity.
At this rate of things we may never own anything physical again.
I have written 2 utilities that may be of use to digital archivists:
printable-binary: A way to visualize/serialize raw binary data into a string form that doesn't break terminals (converts to/from specially-selected utf8 glyphs that stay monospaced in most fonts) which has some unique features: https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary
bitrot_guard (yeah, apparently I can't decide whether to use hyphens or underscores in names yet, lol): A way to restore a user-configurable percent of data degradation in a file or set of files... without touching the original files. Only dependency is par2: https://github.com/pmarreck/bitrot_guard
The differences in disk size and software needed to access the Hawking material is typical of the early floppy disk era. "There wasn't one system that dominated the market," Talboom explains. "It was a bit of a wild west out there."
Good heavens this makes me feel ancient. Do today's BBC readers really not know that there were two main sizes of floppy disk?
A bit back I got a https://kryoflux.com/ to try to get some data off old Apple II disks. I think I successfully captured the images, but then I couldn’t really find any tools that would left me examine the filesystems.
Firstly, I think it is really cool that people are archiving potentially interesting material.
Secondly, however, the idea that people, after my death, would spend hours and hours on end going through all of my computers to see what is on there, seems like a nightmare at some level.
Swedish government archives (Riksarkivet) (IIRC; could have been some library or other archive?) used to have a page asking for donations of equipment that can be used to read old disks/discs/tapes. Basically any kind of drives, old computers that those drives can be used with etc, precisely for this reason that sometimes the archive have to rescue data from ancient media.
Can't find it now so not sure if it is still up, but I can't imagine they ended up with enough equipment that they will never need more. Must be something all archives struggle with and there will always be some format they do not already have equipment for, or some machine they need spare parts for?
What's really interesting about floppy disks is, if you find one from the late 80s or early 90s, it'll probably still be readable. Try to read a CD-R from 2000 and you don't have such good luck.
18 comments
[ 209 ms ] story [ 1653 ms ] threadThe lore is that the world was moving to 3.5 and Alan Sugar (who owned Spectrum brand later after Amstrad bought them out) got a huge job lot of drives and disks cheap so they used them for the +3 as well as the existing CPC systems that had them (in fact the +3 used a modified version of AMDOS which ran the drives on the CPC).
It wasn't a terrible spectrum but it was already very obsolete by the time it was released.
I'm not sure what else was there that they'll find interesting. Maybe they'll let me know.
I worked in a Mac lab briefly in college and we ran Disinfectant from time to time on the lab machines. Sometimes we would find Mac viruses infecting a file or two and I collected a few of these on a floppy. The archivist seemed delighted to have a few disks with "contained" Mac viruses as well.
We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum. Which is really just a life time of a person. Stored well and right paper could out last all of our digital alternatives. The M-DISC is expensive per GB, and I think they went bankrupt in 2020, and BlueRay disc is too small in capacity.
At this rate of things we may never own anything physical again.
https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-thro...
There was a great talk by Jason Scott (textiles) on how he dug out Jordan Mechners original prince of persia source code from the sands of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xNzZMeX5I
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39495973 - February 2024 (23 comments)
https://wiki.techtangents.net/wiki/Floppy_Disk_Imaging
https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
https://kryoflux.com/
printable-binary: A way to visualize/serialize raw binary data into a string form that doesn't break terminals (converts to/from specially-selected utf8 glyphs that stay monospaced in most fonts) which has some unique features: https://github.com/pmarreck/printable-binary
bitrot_guard (yeah, apparently I can't decide whether to use hyphens or underscores in names yet, lol): A way to restore a user-configurable percent of data degradation in a file or set of files... without touching the original files. Only dependency is par2: https://github.com/pmarreck/bitrot_guard
Both should work on macOS/Linux/WSL.
Good heavens this makes me feel ancient. Do today's BBC readers really not know that there were two main sizes of floppy disk?
5¼ floppy → 3.5" floppy → Zip/Jazz Disks → CD/DVD Discs → Hard Drives → Cloud Storage → Self-Hosted RAID
Secondly, however, the idea that people, after my death, would spend hours and hours on end going through all of my computers to see what is on there, seems like a nightmare at some level.
Can't find it now so not sure if it is still up, but I can't imagine they ended up with enough equipment that they will never need more. Must be something all archives struggle with and there will always be some format they do not already have equipment for, or some machine they need spare parts for?