The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks
20 comments
·October 10, 2025noir_lord
The 3" format disks mentioned in the article where "common" in the UK on the Spectrum +3 (which had a built in floppy drive), I owned one at one point.
The lore is that the world was moving to 3.5 and Alan Sugar (who owned Spectrum brand later after Amstrad bought them out) got a huge job lot of drives and disks cheap so they used them for the +3 as well as the existing CPC systems that had them (in fact the +3 used a modified version of AMDOS which ran the drives on the CPC).
It wasn't a terrible spectrum but it was already very obsolete by the time it was released.
rwmj
The Amstrad PCW word processor was also very widespread in UK offices, and that used 3" disks so there must be tons of letters, interoffice memos and other office documents out there in that format. Of course that's only half the problem, the other half is that it used a very strange word processor called Locoscript (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW)
michalpleban
It's a myth. Amstrad computers were already using 3 inch drives in 1984, way before 3.5 inch ones became popular. The drives were chosen due to their similarity to 5.25 drives, so that existing controller chips could be reused. Due to the huge volume of ordered drives, Amstrad did get huge discounts on them, but that had nothing to with the drives becoming obsolete.
pjmlp
I was envious of my friends that owned one, versus my Timex 2068.
It had a much better BASIC, and CP/M was also available (CP/M Plus).
noir_lord
I didn't get the +3 til years after they launched and already had an "old" (not to me) Olivetti PC1 and not long after an Elonex 286 so the +3 was just games really for me at that point - once I got access to Turbo Pascal I had no interest in programming BASIC any more.
pjmlp
Same here regarding Turbo Pascal, however I first had to go through GW-BASIC and Turbo BASIC, with a bit of Z80, 68000 and 80x86 before getting into Turbo Pascal.
Between the Amstrad PC1512 at the school club, the other friends lucky enough to have Amiga 500 which organized demoscene like parties at their places, until I finally got hold of a 386SX.
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noufalibrahim
My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks. I still have them but they're probably unreadable now due to fungus on the platters.
There was a great talk by Jason Scott (textiles) on how he dug out Jordan Mechners original prince of persia source code from the sands of time.
Cthulhu_
> original prince of persia source code from the sands of time.
I see what you did there
ksec
Oh Nice, I tried to submit this but never got on to the front page.
We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum. Which is really just a life time of a person. Stored well and right paper could out last all of our digital alternatives. The M-DISC is expensive per GB, and I think they went bankrupt in 2020, and BlueRay disc is too small in capacity.
At this rate of things we may never own anything physical again.
alnwlsn
Our best answer might be film. Some of it has already survived 80 years. (Micro)film is supposed to last something like 500 years, and it's what Github picked for their Arctic Code Vault. I was curious one time so I looked into it, but it seems like most effort is on converting microfilm to digital, not the other way around.
Anecdotally, the stuff my grandpa filmed on Super-8 is still in nearly perfect condition 65 years later. But most of his 16mm stuff from just a few years earlier than that has vinegar syndrome, so it's not "just film it and you're good"
at-fates-hands
Back in 2015, Wired did an article about the Nuclear Bunker that holds some of Hollywood's oldest films and TV Shows:
If the film is rare, highly flammable, and was made before 1951, there's a good chance it'll end up on George Willeman's desk. Or more specifically, in one of his vaults. As the Nitrate Film Vault Manager at The Library of Congress' Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, Willeman presides over more than 160,000 reels of combustible cinematic treasure, from the original camera negatives of 1903's The Great Train Robbery to the early holdings of big studios like Columbia, Warner Bros, and Universal. And more barrels keep showing up every week.
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/film-preservation/
Archive link: https://archive.ph/zluV8
weaverheavy
>We really need something that could store data for 80 years minimum.
Minidisc. I have discs that are 30+ years old that have been abused their entire life and still work fine with no noticeable degradation. I specifically choose this format to archive audio because the disc housing works great for environmental protection and I’d eventually like to give my music collection to my children/grand children. The discs can also store data. My minidisc player shows up as removable storage device when I plug it into my computer so I can throw anywhere from about 140mb-1Gb(hi-MD) per disk.
Officially they’re rated to about 50 years, but if you sealed them and stored them properly then they could easily make it past 80 years.
myself248
The trouble is that the players likely won't last as long as the media. And nobody's making new players. Microfilm has the advantage that cameras continue to be relevant and fundamentally the reader is just a camera.
dbspin
Should Microsoft ever actually make it available as a product Project Silica would fit the bit - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-sil...
noir_lord
Archival LTO has a life of 30 years (under proper storage) - likely longer but they "warranty" for 30 years.
The issue is that anything you made like that would need to be forward readable because storage capacity demands only ever increase over time.
i.e. imagine a 1.44MB 80 year floppy disk from 1985, while it'd last til 2065 no one would use it in 2025 because you'd need about a thousand of them to hold a modern 4K video
mellosouls
Nice article, cool jumper!
nubinetwork
Anyone can do this, buy a grease weasel.
scyzoryk_xyz
I wouldn't want to be trapped on an old floppy disk.
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.