[HN Gopher] Time to preserve those floppy disks ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-05 23:00 UTC)