[HN Gopher] Time to preserve those floppy disks
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Time to preserve those floppy disks
 
Author : wsces
Score  : 58 points
Date   : 2023-09-02 18:38 UTC (3 days ago)
 
web link (www.patreon.com)
w3m dump (www.patreon.com)
 
| Bluecobra wrote:
| Interesting, I knew about *.wav files for data cassette images
| but not for floppies. Makes me wonder if there's other ways to
| get the data off it that might be more accurate. Are hobbyist
| electron microscopes a thing yet? :)
 
| egypturnash wrote:
| One of the links in this article leads down a heck of a rabbit
| hole for those of you who love ultra-tiny keyboards: Plover, the
| open-source stenography engine, which uses what is essentially a
| _15%_ chording keyboard and a very dense shortcut expansion
| dictionary to let you type at ~200-300 wpm vs. the 40-120 wpm of
| QWERTY.
| 
| https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/
| 
| Yes, there are people who use it for programming, too.
| 
| Not my thing at all, but maybe it's yours.
 
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's a wild ride into old data formats, data recovery, digital-
| analogue conversion, data forensics, steganography, and the legal
| system.
 
| pcshah1996 wrote:
| One of my first (toy) websites was a silly floppy disk size
| calculator. You could enter an amount of songs/movies/files/etc
| and it would tell you how many disks it would take:
| https://howmanyfloppydisks.com/
| 
| It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown
| over time.
 
  | BizarreByte wrote:
  | > It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has
  | grown over time.
  | 
  | And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are
  | absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy
  | no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy
  | even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with
  | floppies lasting any length of time at all.
  | 
  | I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in it
  | (at most), now I can get an SD card with 1000 times that. It's
  | amazing and truthfully I don't understand how it's possible.
 
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > this document was handed back to the court system, and Maryland
| has now exonerated not one but two individuals from wrongful
| accusation ... These men did time in jail, their permanent
| records impacted.
| 
| Writing tip: this should be the first or second sentence in the
| article to draw people in. Instead, it's at the end.
 
  | pcthrowaway wrote:
  | Disagree, that's the spoiler. You want a hook instead. Talk
  | about the potential impact of the data recovery, but don't give
  | away the outcome.
 
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(page generated 2023-09-05 23:00 UTC)