[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)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.patreon.com)
 (TXT) 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)