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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Nothing on the level of Stephen Hawking's notes, but I handed off a decent sized stack of early Mac floppies to some "archivists" at a recent vintage computer festival. I understand there was a commercial game or two in the mix that had not yet been archived from the original floppy (on Macintosh Garden or archive.org).

I'm not sure what else was there that they'll find interesting. Maybe they'll let me know.

I worked in a Mac lab briefly in college and we ran Disinfectant from time to time on the lab machines. Sometimes we would find Mac viruses infecting a file or two and I collected a few of these on a floppy. The archivist seemed delighted to have a few disks with "contained" Mac viruses as well.

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A few years ago I had a Mac floppy from the 90's I could no longer read but wanted to retrieve a file from. I sent it to a data recovery service that had high expectations of success, but they failed too. It was so disappointing.

I'm surprised anything is recoverable on disks that old.

When I used floppy disks routinely, their lifespan was a matter of months if they were used regularly. For stuff I was working on daily, I would always save it twice to separate disks. I'd be fortunate to get through a school term without having disk errors, so I learned pretty quickly the value of having multiple copies.

For stuff that was just archives, saved and then rarely accessed, they would survive longer. My guess is just that the read/write heads were fairly abrasive and wore down the magnetic layer of the disks pretty quickly under heavy use.

I saw a 8086 in '96 that still booted every day from the same 360KB floppy (no HDD).

My experience is that floppies generally last long. I volunteered for a charity and was sorting through book donations a couple of months ago and I found a floppy hidden in a hollowed out book (presumably mistakenly donated) containing files dated from 2004.

> When I used floppy disks routinely, their lifespan was a matter of months if they were used regularly.

Your experience is very different from mine. I used floppies with favorite games and such on them for at least 3 years pretty regularly when I was in high school/early uni in the mid 80's. And I can't remember EVER actually having disk errors in school with homework and such on them. Possibly I did, but I'd think losing that critical piece of homework would have stuck with me.

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