[FRIAM] Floppy disks still live. Sorta

[Prof David West]

My very first PC was a Xerox 820 with a cabled IBM selectric as a printer and (2) 8" floppy drives.

davew


On Wed, Sep 14, 2022, at 9:58 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
> When Mary moved here she had a collection of 3.5" floppies with her 
> early poetry on them...  she wasn't sure what she had and hadn't had a 
> floppy drive to look at them with since the 90s.   As it turned out I 
> had a USB floppy reader I had bought to help someone else recover their 
> history and she copied everything onto her hard drive... a few of the 
> floppies were unreadable... I don't remember the details (5 years ago?)  
> I believe that deep in my shed there is a mid 80s PC with a 5.25" 
> internal floppy drive... <sigh>.   I also had a "core memory" artifact 
> from one of the earlyish LASL machines in my office for decades but I 
> can't remember when/where I let it go.
>
> I remember a Sandia?  Engineer who I would occasionally encounter on 
> flights in/out of ABQ and layovers.   He would carry a small stack of 
> punch cards that he used to take notes on and when anyone would ask him 
> about them, he would tell them about the history of such items and  
> offer to sell them one for $1, and apparently many, many people took him 
> up on that deal... a good deal by some measure for everyone.  I saw him 
> sell at least 5 or 6 in the times I was in his presence (on the plane, 
> waiting for a flight, etc). and I wonder where all those strange little 
> artifacts ended up? Ed or someone else on the same flight paths I was on 
> in those days might know who he is?   Sandia Engineers (and Scientists) 
> were easy to spot in airports, esp.  ABQ...  maybe LANL too, but Sandia 
> had a particular signature "look"?   The cards were probably Sandia 
> property and there is probably a waste/fraud/abuse scandal to be had in 
> there somewhere...  gak!
>
> I also used to collect exposed 35mm film from garage sales and friends 
> going digital?  Why would anyone have *exposed* film? Nobody knows 
> exactly... I assume the transition time when someone would deprecate an 
> old camera (after going digital) would lead to at least *one* roll of 
> film in the old camera half-exposed.   I kept them in a ziplock freezer 
> bag, thinking that *someday* I would (hand) process them all as a sort 
> of performance-art experience.   Instead I encountered someone about 5 
> years ago who was doing a similar thing and I simply gave my collection 
> (20 or more) of exposed rolls to them (along with a similar number of 
> frozen unexposed rolls).
>
> I also expect that abandoned USB sticks and micro/mini/SD/??? cards will 
> also be an interesting Archeological find someday.   I have a 4" 
> diameter metal pipe core to my spiral staircase with an open (capped) 
> top which I have come to use as a "time capsule". Every few weeks I have 
> a small collection of artifacts that have no proper use but are 
> entertaining in their own right that I drop down there.  I have at least 
> 3 or 4 USB sticks layered in there. I don't know exactly how deep my 
> collection is... I've been doing this casually for years but only with 
> small and acutely (at the moment) interesting items...  Maybe 1 foot 
> deep more or less? The presumption is that decades from now the house 
> (owner-built in the early 80s) will burn down or be bulldozed to put in 
> some ultra-modern thing and the spiral staircase will be the last thing 
> standing and *maybe* someone will notice as 1000 tiny bits of gak flow 
> out of the pipe as they haul it off.  Or not.   I've been tempted to cut 
> a tiny "door" in the bottom to provide access, but that would ruin the 
> conceit I think.  Maybe paint a "fairy door" in the same location to 
> suggest to a curious person to do so? MMmmmMM?
>
> I would drop the old floppy and a (newer) DVD-USB drive down the hole as 
> a "bootstrap", but they are both too big.
>
>
>
> On 9/14/22 10:09 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
>> https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/#:post_86454
>>
>> =======================
>> Tom Johnson
>> Inst. for Analytic Journalism
>> Santa Fe, New Mexico
>> 505-577-6482
>> =======================
>>
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