The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251009-rescuing-knowledge-trapped-on-old-floppy-disks

by jnord • 10 months ago

110 57 10 months ago

I wouldn't want to be trapped on an old floppy disk.

noir_lord4• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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.

pjmlp2• 9 months ago

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_lord4• 9 months ago

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.

rwmj• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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 I understand there was a commercial game or two in the mix that had not yet been archived from the original floppy (on Macintosh Garden or archive.org).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• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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.

ksec• 9 months ago

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_lord4• 9 months ago

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

namibj• 9 months ago

You need to very carefully dry it, possibly with a re spooling to destress, and then keep it at or below 18C, but it has to be stable.

Though the same applies to polycarbonate/acrylic-glue BD-R.

If you do that they'll keep for centuries, at least the tapes that use oxygen resistant magnetic particles like BaFe (not MP).

Calcium oxide aka burnt lime is a cheap non-toxic (but caustic!) desiccant that can keep an e.g. paint can dry for centuries.

weaverheavy2• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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.

alnwlsn• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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...

Aloha2• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

Anyone can do this, buy a grease weasel.

mellosouls• 9 months ago

Nice article, cool jumper!

herjazz• 9 months ago

Agreed. She goes into more depth how she made them here:

https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-thro...

noufalibrahim2• 9 months ago

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_• 9 months ago

original prince of persia source code from the sands of time.

I see what you did there

noufalibrahim2• 9 months ago

Had to be said. I believe that was the title of the original talk too

2mlWQbCK3• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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/

rasz3• 9 months ago

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

2mlWQbCK3• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597763

pmarreck2• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

Come on bro, trigger warning please!

pmarreck2• 9 months ago

Knowing the Python philosophy, I assume that's the "one true way" to address the naming distinction across the board?

paultopia2• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

i don't think that's the type of knowledge you can expect fron even contenporary non-technical readers

Aloha2• 9 months ago

I mean.. no?

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

fragmede• 9 months ago

proprietary zip and later jaz drives as well

jve• 9 months ago

This list is wild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats

coldpie• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

I saw only one size of floppy disks in my life and I'm 35.

onair4you2• 9 months ago

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.

rasz3• 9 months ago

https://github.com/davidgiven/fluxengine

onair4you2• 9 months ago

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.

NoSalt• 9 months ago

What a journey our data has taken:

5¼ floppy → 3.5" floppy → Zip/Jazz Disks → CD/DVD Discs → Hard Drives → Cloud Storage → Self-Hosted RAID

mosselman• 9 months ago

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.

2mlWQbCK3• 9 months ago

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• 9 months ago

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.

The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

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