The People Rescuing Forgotten Knowledge Trapped On Old Floppy Disks (bbc.com) 57
smooth wombat writes: At one point in technology history, floppy disks reigned supreme. Files, pictures, games, everything was put on a floppy disk. But technology doesn't stand still and as time went on disks were replaced by CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, and now cloud storage. Despite these changes, floppy disks are still found in long forgotten corners of businesses or stuffed in boxs in the attic. What is on these disks is anyone's guess, but Cambridge University Library is racing against time to preserve the data. However, lack of hardware and software to read the disks, if they're readable at all, poses unique challenges.
Some of the world's most treasured documents can be found deep in the archives of Cambridge University Library. There are letters from Sir Isaac Newton, notebooks belonging to Charles Darwin, rare Islamic texts and the Nash Papyrus -- fragments of a sheet from 200BC containing the Ten Commandments written in Hebrew.
These rare, and often unique, manuscripts are safely stored in climate-controlled environments while staff tenderly care for them to prevent the delicate pages from crumbling and ink from flaking away.
But when the library received 113 boxes of papers and mementoes from the office of physicist Stephen Hawking, it found itself with an unusual challenge. Tucked alongside the letters, photographs and thousands of pages relating to Hawking's work on theoretical physics, were items now not commonly seen in modern offices -- floppy disks.
They were the result of Hawking's early adoption of the personal computer, which he was able to use despite having a form of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, thanks to modifications and software. Locked inside these disks could be all kinds of forgotten information or previously unknown insights into the scientists' life. The archivists' minds boggled.
These disks are now part of a project at Cambridge University Library to rescue hidden knowledge trapped on floppy disks. The Future Nostalgia project reflects a larger trend in the information flooding into archives and libraries around the world.
Some of the world's most treasured documents can be found deep in the archives of Cambridge University Library. There are letters from Sir Isaac Newton, notebooks belonging to Charles Darwin, rare Islamic texts and the Nash Papyrus -- fragments of a sheet from 200BC containing the Ten Commandments written in Hebrew.
These rare, and often unique, manuscripts are safely stored in climate-controlled environments while staff tenderly care for them to prevent the delicate pages from crumbling and ink from flaking away.
But when the library received 113 boxes of papers and mementoes from the office of physicist Stephen Hawking, it found itself with an unusual challenge. Tucked alongside the letters, photographs and thousands of pages relating to Hawking's work on theoretical physics, were items now not commonly seen in modern offices -- floppy disks.
They were the result of Hawking's early adoption of the personal computer, which he was able to use despite having a form of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, thanks to modifications and software. Locked inside these disks could be all kinds of forgotten information or previously unknown insights into the scientists' life. The archivists' minds boggled.
These disks are now part of a project at Cambridge University Library to rescue hidden knowledge trapped on floppy disks. The Future Nostalgia project reflects a larger trend in the information flooding into archives and libraries around the world.
Re:wtfbbq (Score:4, Insightful)
it's the archivists who can retrieve the data and pass it along, physicists are neither trained, equipped nor experienced at the job of information retrieval from old media. Specialization is a thing in science.
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Re:wtfbbq (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually probably not, there is an entire field called 'Digital Forensics' who will probably be given these disks to work with considering their value. Old floppy disks have to be treated very carefully, you can't just pull the old Pentium out of the basement and pop them in. The oxide layer can detach from the substrate, and some of the substrates were of materials which have gotten brittle with time, they would be able to look at the manufacturer and the storage conditions and figure out the best way to read them. These would be the same folks who pull data off of formatted hard drives, R/W CDs that have been left in the sun, or ancient Wang 2 1/2" disks.
Physicists, computer scientists, AND archivists. (Score:5, Insightful)
Physicists for cases where the actual magnetic bits on the disk are degraded such that they cannot be read by a disk reader.
Computer scientists for the cases where the bits can be detected but the format is no longer readable.
Archivists for once the information is read and decodes, to correctly index it and make it usable
Imaging them off, I imagine (Score:1)
I imagine the are going to just have them imaged off as .vfd files for the "standard" 3.5" & 5.25" floppies and call it a day (for the data on the disks part, I did that with my own years..huh...decades ago? Crap, time flys). Maybe some high rez pictures of any that are labeled by people (especially if by Mr. Hawking). I have no idea on those Amstrad Floppy disk variants (compatibility wise)....oh, just read the linked article "3-inch Treasures: Transferring Material from Amstrad Floppy Disks", yup, loo
Greaseweazle (Score:2)
I do this kind of stuff all the time. Get a Greaseweazle and spend a few days imaging the disks. It's not difficult
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Seriously. The author makes it sound like they're translating hieroglyphics without the rosetta stone. There's only a handful of drives that didn't use standard 5.25 or 8" floppies. Some Data General drives being a notable example.
WP (Score:3)
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Depends on a lot [Re:Greaseweazle] (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously. The author makes it sound like they're translating hieroglyphics without the rosetta stone. There's only a handful of drives that didn't use standard 5.25 or 8" floppies. Some Data General drives being a notable example.
The bits on floppies are magnetic; the magnetism decays, and the information becomes unreadable.. How long it takes to lose the information depends SENSITIVELY on the manufacturer (not all disks are alike) the year (they got better, but manufacturers also learned to cut corners to make them cheaper), on the writer (how strongly was it magnetized) and the reader (how sensitive is the reader) and on the storage temperature.
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The oxide can flake as well, and some of the substrates got brittle if they weren't stored correctly. Then there's the fun of trying to figure out what the file actually is. Word processor? Database? Executable? At least Windows insisted on a file extension that can give a clue, but a lot of the early systems didn't (and Linux still doesn't).
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Wang word processors used a 2 1/2" disk, leading a coworker to comment that he "was put in charge of handling a 2 1/1" Wang" when he was tasked with retrieving some data off one.
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I found reading the full article worthwhile and believe the exclusive reader will find it similarly.
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If it's important write it down. (Score:2)
I guess what I'm saying is, if it's important - record it on vinyl?
Re: If it's important write it down. (Score:3)
Baked clay tablets are the best proven technology for long term archival. Use some error correction and a good storage policy and you should be good for the foreseeable future. You also need to create LOTS of copies of correspondences between the clay writing and other widely used written languages so that you can reconstruct the semantics after 1000 years when the language has been forgotten.
Benefit over chiseling is it's much easier and cheaper to record on soft clay.
Could probably even adapt the technolo
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The smaller you write, the less obvious it is to future trash-pickers that there's any writing there. You could put a large font title somewhere, but what if that bit is broken off?
Hey! (Score:2)
Don't copy that floppy!
Spoiler: every floppy disk is completely blank (Score:5, Funny)
———
I have a truly marvelous demonstration of Grand Unified Theory which the capacity of this floppy disk is too small to contain. Sincerely yours,
Stephen Hawking
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
University of Cambridge
Been there, done that (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not that long ago that I found myself with a box of 8" floppy discs from a legacy product and no way to read them. Yes, the software on them was long obsolete. But I would have liked to be able to preserve a bit of company heritage.
The product in question (Glenayre GL-3000) had been updated in the interim to use 3.5" floppies, though with a bespoke format. I figured out how to use Linux and creative parameters to dd to write disc images. We packaged this as a bootable CD for customers to write their own disc images. After a sharp drop in floppy quality around 2005 I discussed other storage options with my boss (e.g. USB) but the business case just wasn't there.
...laura
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Nice work. There is a solution for this now though. A Greaseweazel is a cheap device that you can connect most floppy drives to, and which can read pretty much any format. Rather than acting as a normal floppy drive controller, it just captures the raw flux transitions and then allows the computer to decode them. A typical disk ends up being about 50MB of data, but it captures everything perfectly, including copy protected disks.
I've been using one for a while. The only thing that could be improved is that
We could lose the permanence code! (Score:2)
Without their efforts, we could lose the permanence code!
GCR (Score:3)
It's not impossible obviously, but it's likely the best way to do this is with a vintage Mac itself. Which then implies hooking up a mass storage device of some kind to that Mac so that it can be transferred to something more modern. So not super rare and impossible, but definitely fiddly.
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Re:GCR (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't need any custom sensor hardware to read the disk as the original drives have signal lines that provide all that's needed. They usually have some automatic gain control, but it usually gives the right result.
You still need to connect the drive to a cheap device like the Greaseweazle (USB), which reads the raw flux reversals from the surface (plus timing information) as they're picked up by the drive head. All data decoding is done in software on the host system, which can handle ANY encoding type, and be smarter about error recovery.
The disks themselves sometimes need a bit of manual cleaning to be in a good position to read. Not everything can be recovered but older disks are generally more reliable than cheaper newer media.
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Re: GCR (Score:2)
I kinda think most of the mechanism can be done with legos and some 3d prints for various spindle adapters. While different floppy technolgies used different track widths, you can almost always use a smaller width sensor to read a larger media width. (writing with a smaller head was a huge compatibility problem back in the day. Like DD in an HD drive.)
The magic of a teensy, rpi pico, etc can likely handle the stream of data from the head. Software can make sense of various encodings. Variable density encodi
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it's likely the best way to do this is with a vintage Mac itself. Which then implies hooking up a mass storage device of some kind to that Mac
Nah, there are ethernet cards for vintage macs, and you can use netatalk to provide them with file services. This makes a lot more sense today than messing with antique SCSI drives. You also don't have to get very vintage to read those floppies, there are lots of machines out there which will do it.
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If it's a Mac there are a lot of them still working. I have a Mac SE with 800K drives. It also has a hard drive that still works. They made Ethernet cards for it to which I do not have, drat it. But it will LocalTalk to the G3 which does have Ethernet.
You could also use the serial ports the old fashioned way.
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I used to and might even still have a localtalk to ethertalk bridge. It was made by one of the handful of ubiquitous 68k era suppliers that made everything for macs back then, but I forget which.
BITD I used to run netatalk, samba, and nfs on the same Linux box for a geek house. Everybody could access their homes and a shared drive.
They also made localtalk cards for PCs.
I am due to make another pass through my cables and crap bins and free another one up, I might still have an ethernet card which I think is
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Adrian's Digital Workshop has videos on repairing old computers including Macs. If you are inclined to try to fix the SE you could look there. If you can figure out where to send it you could even donate it him for a video repair.
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"It's quite difficult to date floppy disks as peop (Score:2)
It's not like it's a challenge to look at the time stamps on the files for DOS diskettes.
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A lot of the older DOS systems (XT and the like) didn't have a clock built in. If you wanted one you had to buy a separate card and run a little program as part of your autoexec.bat to set the current date and time.
Otherwise, unless you specifically entered the date and time when you booted up the system, your current date and time was midnight of January 1, 1980.
So a great many DOS files are dated January 1, 1980 regardless of when they were actually written.
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That's what I said. You needed an extra board to keep the time between boots and most people didn't bother with one.
So every time you booted up your computer if you didn't enter the date and time (and a lot of people didn't bother) then your files were dated January 1, 1980.
I bet it's all his porn stash (Score:2)
Made him go from floppy to hard faster than the speed of light.
Library Technology (Score:2)
Trained archivist are experts in data storage and retrieval techniques and technology. If they need any help I've got an IBM 8" floppy drive that still works. A whole 3000 80x132 punch card storage. Who would ever need more than 640K memory ?
CuriousMarc (Score:2)
Now imagine it was on some cloud not floppies (Score:1)
Now imagine if all this was not on floppies or DVDs or pen drives but on some cloud service that was the flavor of the day during the time. And is no longer operational. Or wants to do 2FA with Hawking's phone or email.
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Luckily my couple of 1TB external SSDs will ensure humanity is not deprived of my 'hidden' knowledge and umm.. carefully selected videos
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Warm up Deluxe Option Board/Greaseweazles (Score:2)
Also, if anyone has good floppy images for Northgate keyboards or Thrustmaster F-16 HOTAS, I'm still missing them. ):
I don't get it (Score:3)
How can people be trapped on old floppy disks?
lotsa luck (Score:2)
Floppies are very volatile. Stuff that old they will likely lose about 1/4 of the data, based on my personal experience with hundreds of 20-30 year old floppies I recovered a couple of years ago. Even the brand name high quality ones.
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I imaged all my 1980s TRS-80 floppy disks around 2008 or so. The only read errors were original errors from back in the day. Sometimes you could even see the bad spot on the disk.
I wouldn't feel so confident about 1990s 3.5" HD floppies, but that's because they were crap, especially the cheap 25-pack disks. They were always bad and don't get worse with time. It's more likely that you had problems from misaligned or dirty drive heads.