Adam's Images

By ajt

Floppy floppy

My wife has been cleaning out some of her university stuff. She was a more published scientist than I ever was, and in most respects the better scientist too. Like me she has copious presentation slides and old 90 mm/3.5 inch floppy disks, but she found this old 5.25 inch floppy disk, where the outer case is also floppy...

There is a chance that for the 3.5 inch floppies I could still find a drive and still read them, but the physically larger 5.25 inch format pictured here went out of fashion earlier and so the data on this drive is probably lost forever. Even if I could find a drive, the life span of the actual disk isn't that great and if the data on it is in proprietary format, then even if I could get the bits off the disk there is no guarantee that I could find any software that could read it... 

I know I copied my old PhD thesis off floppy onto various CDs and it's on my desktop somewhere, but it's in Word for Windows format version 2, which is probably not that easy to read anymore! In some respects we are generating and losing data at a faster rate than at anytime in history!

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