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by noufalibrahim 781 days ago
My earliest "large" program which I can remember was a drawing program I wrote in GW BASIC. You could draw figures, change brushes, I think it had a crude filling function and a few other things. In my innocence, I backed it up onto 5.25" floppy disks, labelled them neatly and put them in a box. This was in the late 1980s.

Fast forward to 2024, I still have the disks but no drive to read them. On the other hand, the notebooks where I wrote out some of the routines for the programs are still with me and I can read them. Says a lot about "digital archiving".
3 comments
mdorazio 781 days ago
FYI if you want to get things off a 5.25 floppy, you can get a Greaseweazle for $25 and use it with any 5.25 drive. https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/
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darkstar_16 781 days ago
Are you me ? I wrote an exact program like this in GW Basic back in the day. I remember adding the ability to draw coloured lines but I had no way to verify since my computer monitor was one of those with green coloured pixels. Finally got to see everything in full colour at my school lab and was so thrilled. Those were the days ...
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noufalibrahim 781 days ago
Nice. I had a 256 colour VGA monitor so... :D
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Almondsetat 780 days ago
>Says a lot about "digital archiving"

It doesn't, since you could easily buy a USB floppy disk reader

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noufalibrahim 780 days ago
I haven't looked recently but I did search a while ago for a 5.25" USB floppy drive but never found any. Several 3.5" though.

Also, I haven't done any specific climate control for the books or the disks. The notebooks are still readable and I can even tell the difference in the parts I wrote with a ball pen and a fountain pen. Many of the disks are damaged with fungal growth on the magnetic medium and I doubt I'd be able to read them even with a drive.

It's quite challenging to read off an old disk. Jason Scott (the famous digital archivist) had a nice talk on recovering the original source code for Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia from ancient disks that mentions some of the challenges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8

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Narishma 780 days ago
You don't have to buy anything to read the notebook though.
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Almondsetat 780 days ago
After 30 years you might need a new pair of glasses
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