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by Almondsetat 776 days ago
>Says a lot about "digital archiving"

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

2 comments

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

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