[HN Gopher] The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on o...
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The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks
Author : jnord
Score : 95 points
Date : 2025-10-10 23:36 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| I wouldn't want to be trapped on an old floppy disk.
| noir_lord wrote:
| 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.
| michalpleban wrote:
| It's a myth. Amstrad computers were already using 3 inch drives
| in 1984, way before 3.5 inch ones became popular. The drives
| were chosen due to their similarity to 5.25 drives, so that
| existing controller chips could be reused. Due to the huge
| volume of ordered drives, Amstrad did get huge discounts on
| them, but that had nothing to with the drives becoming
| obsolete.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I was envious of my friends that owned one, versus my Timex
| 2068.
|
| It had a much better BASIC, and CP/M was also available (CP/M
| Plus).
| noir_lord wrote:
| I didn't get the +3 til years after they launched and already
| had an "old" (not to me) Olivetti PC1 and not long after an
| Elonex 286 so the +3 was just games really for me at that
| point - once I got access to Turbo Pascal I had no interest
| in programming BASIC any more.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Same here regarding Turbo Pascal, however I first had to go
| through GW-BASIC and Turbo BASIC, with a bit of Z80, 68000
| and 80x86 before getting into Turbo Pascal.
|
| Between the Amstrad PC1512 at the school club, the other
| friends lucky enough to have Amiga 500 which organized
| demoscene like parties at their places, until I finally got
| hold of a 386SX.
| rwmj wrote:
| The Amstrad PCW word processor was also very widespread in UK
| offices, and that used 3" disks so there must be tons of
| letters, interoffice memos and other office documents out there
| in that format. Of course that's only half the problem, the
| other half is that it used a very strange word processor called
| Locoscript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| sema4hacker wrote:
| A few years ago I had a Mac floppy from the 90's I could no
| longer read but wanted to retrieve a file from. I sent it to a
| data recovery service that had high expectations of success,
| but they failed too. It was so disappointing.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm surprised anything is recoverable on disks that old.
|
| When I used floppy disks routinely, their lifespan was a
| matter of months if they were used regularly. For stuff I was
| working on daily, I would always save it twice to separate
| disks. I'd be fortunate to get through a school term without
| having disk errors, so I learned pretty quickly the value of
| having multiple copies.
|
| For stuff that was just archives, saved and then rarely
| accessed, they would survive longer. My guess is just that
| the read/write heads were fairly abrasive and wore down the
| magnetic layer of the disks pretty quickly under heavy use.
| M95D wrote:
| I saw a 8086 in '96 that still booted every day from the
| same 360KB floppy (no HDD).
| ksec wrote:
| 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.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Archival LTO has a life of 30 years (under proper storage) -
| likely longer but they "warranty" for 30 years.
|
| The issue is that anything you made like that would need to be
| forward readable because storage capacity demands only ever
| increase over time.
|
| i.e. imagine a 1.44MB 80 year floppy disk from 1985, while it'd
| last til 2065 no one would use it in 2025 because you'd need
| about a thousand of them to hold a modern 4K video
| weaverheavy wrote:
| >We really need something that could store data for 80 years
| minimum.
|
| Minidisc. I have discs that are 30+ years old that have been
| abused their entire life and still work fine with no noticeable
| degradation. I specifically choose this format to archive audio
| because the disc housing works great for environmental
| protection and I'd eventually like to give my music collection
| to my children/grand children. The discs can also store data.
| My minidisc player shows up as removable storage device when I
| plug it into my computer so I can throw anywhere from about
| 140mb-1Gb(hi-MD) per disk.
|
| Officially they're rated to about 50 years, but if you sealed
| them and stored them properly then they could easily make it
| past 80 years.
| myself248 wrote:
| The trouble is that the players likely won't last as long as
| the media. And nobody's making new players. Microfilm has the
| advantage that cameras continue to be relevant and
| fundamentally the reader is just a camera.
| weaverheavy wrote:
| I have working players that are older than I am. They're
| mechanically very simple, just lube the gears up
| occasionally and keep them clean. They use the same laser
| that a cd player does, and the service manuals for most
| devices are available for free online and they have part
| numbers for all of the ICs, and wiring diagrams and
| schematics for the all of the components.
|
| An enterprising individual could probably clone an old
| device and flash a stock firmware to it if they really
| wanted to. The functionality that goes first in older
| devices is usually the write head, but you'd probably still
| be able to read discs for decades if you took care of the
| device and stored it well.
|
| The minidisc community online is also very active and
| people are active working to reverse engineer virtually
| every aspect of the players and disc writing software, and
| some people even produce new drop-in replacement parts for
| the components that tend to fail like OLED displays, etc.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| Our best answer might be film. Some of it has already survived
| 80 years. (Micro)film is supposed to last something like 500
| years, and it's what Github picked for their Arctic Code Vault.
| I was curious one time so I looked into it, but it seems like
| most effort is on converting microfilm to digital, not the
| other way around.
|
| Anecdotally, the stuff my grandpa filmed on Super-8 is still in
| nearly perfect condition 65 years later. But most of his 16mm
| stuff from just a few years earlier than that has vinegar
| syndrome, so it's not "just film it and you're good"
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Back in 2015, Wired did an article about the Nuclear Bunker
| that holds some of Hollywood's oldest films and TV Shows:
|
| _If the film is rare, highly flammable, and was made before
| 1951, there 's a good chance it'll end up on George
| Willeman's desk. Or more specifically, in one of his vaults.
| As the Nitrate Film Vault Manager at The Library of Congress'
| Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, Willeman
| presides over more than 160,000 reels of combustible
| cinematic treasure, from the original camera negatives of
| 1903's The Great Train Robbery to the early holdings of big
| studios like Columbia, Warner Bros, and Universal. And more
| barrels keep showing up every week._
|
| https://www.wired.com/2015/07/film-preservation/
|
| Archive link: https://archive.ph/zluV8
| schlauerfox wrote:
| Vinegar Syndrome is on film base/stocks that are cellulose
| acetate, they break down into acetic acid. Films after that
| period are estar base which is polyethylene terephthalate and
| very stable for archival. In fact if it jams a film projector
| it more likely wrecks the projector than breaks, which is
| kinda bad.
| dbspin wrote:
| Should Microsoft ever actually make it available as a product
| Project Silica would fit the bit -
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...
| Aloha wrote:
| I've had an idea for wide format, high density, optically read,
| punched mylar (or other similar plastic) film - so something
| like a 5 foot roll of mylar punched at 12-16 dpi. Leading to
| storage in the 1-2k bytes per linear inch.
|
| Mylar if stored properly could last a very very long time.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > We really need something that could store data for 80 years
| minimum.
|
| We have that. We know how to put digital data onto paper, at
| high density. Not high compared to actual drives or even optic
| disks of course, but still enough that we could put all
| importan data that a person produces throughout a lifetime into
| a large box of A4 sheets, which would still be legible after
| many decades. All that's needed is an agreement on a clever
| collection of formats for text and images, maybe even video,
| formats that are well documented (ideally the documentation is
| stored alongside the data).
|
| The problem is not that we don't have the tech to do such
| things, the problem is
|
| a) In our current world, the only things that seem to get huge
| amounts of resources are those that make some shareholders
| happy
|
| b) Most of the data humanity produces these days, is useless
| noise, and the only reason anyone collects it, is to make a
| quick buck. And generative AI has made this trend a lot worse.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| Anyone can do this, buy a grease weasel.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Nice article, cool jumper!
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks. I still
| have them but they're probably unreadable now due to fungus on
| the platters.
|
| 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
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > original prince of persia source code from the sands of time.
|
| I see what you did there
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| Had to be said. I believe that was the title of the original
| talk too
| 2mlWQbCK wrote:
| > My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks
|
| Mine as well, but luckily many years ago I copied all the
| contents of my old floppies to CD-ROMs, and then later all the
| CD-ROMs to DVDs, and finally to USB-harddisks, and now all the
| files live happily (hopefully forever) in my hoard ZFS (and
| several off-site backups).
|
| The only significant exception is most 1.2 MB floppies. Those
| were also 5.25", but the drives were much more difficult to
| calibrate well. Can't get the files from almost any of those. A
| few I can list the filenames, but not access the file contents.
| Most are just unreadable. I could not even find a drive that
| worked well enough to copy those using my KryoFlux.
|
| (* Not that there is anything at all of real value on all those
| old floppies. This is pure nostalgia/hoarding.)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| _Archival Floppy Disk Preservation and Use_ -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxsRpMdmlGo
|
| 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/
| rasz wrote:
| https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine
|
| and my little contribution if you have a $5 logic analyzer
| board (FX2LP) and want to play in Sigrok/PulseView/DSView
| https://github.com/raszpl/sigrok-mfm
| 2mlWQbCK wrote:
| There was a few mentions of KryoFlux in the X-Copy article
| linked from HN 4 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552913 (X-Copy developer
| Christian Bartsch that is interviewed now works on KryoFlux.)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597763
| pmarreck wrote:
| 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
|
| Both should work on macOS/Linux/WSL.
| walkabout wrote:
| > yeah, apparently I can't decide whether to use hyphens or
| underscores in names yet, lol
|
| Go the Python route and hyphenate the name but use underscores
| in the import, for maximum confusion and searchability
| disruption.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Come on bro, trigger warning please!
| pmarreck wrote:
| Knowing the Python philosophy, I assume that's the "one true
| way" to address the naming distinction across the board?
| paultopia wrote:
| _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?
| throawayonthe wrote:
| i don't think that's the type of knowledge you can expect fron
| even contenporary non-technical readers
| Aloha wrote:
| I mean.. no?
|
| 8"
|
| 5 1/4"
|
| 3 1/2"
|
| and a couple less standard ones, then you get into sectoring
| (hard, soft), sidedness and density, plus disk formats on top
| of that
| coldpie wrote:
| That wouldn't be at all surprising, no. Floppy disks were all
| but gone by the turn of the century. People born after 9/11,
| who will never have encountered floppy disks, are in their
| mid-20s and having their own kids by now.
| SweetSoftPillow wrote:
| I saw only one size of floppy disks in my life and I'm 35.
| onair4you wrote:
| 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.
| rasz wrote:
| https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine
| onair4you wrote:
| That's not the issue. I have the images. I just can't find
| any Linux or macOS tools that can interpret the data.
|
| For example, I can mount the FAT images I have for MS-DOS 35
| years ago, but not these.
| rasz wrote:
| Thats exactly what fluxengine is for. You load flux image
| and it exposes the filesystem
| https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/filesystem.html
| NoSalt wrote:
| What a journey our data has taken:
|
| 51/4 floppy - 3.5" floppy - Zip/Jazz Disks - CD/DVD Discs - Hard
| Drives - Cloud Storage - Self-Hosted RAID
| mosselman wrote:
| 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.
| 2mlWQbCK wrote:
| 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?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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.
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