[Coco] Refresh your floppy's

[wdg3rd at comcast.net]

----- "Donald Person" <donald.person at gmail.com> wrote:

> P.S. - For those of you that care about this sort of thing, I burned
> my 
> first CD in 1995 on the college's burner, and ONE blank cost me $15..
> YES, 
> 15 dollars for ONE blank disk  lol -- The burner itself cost the
> college 
> several thousand dollars... What a change in 15 years, eh?! 

Don, when I started at Radio Shack almost three decades ago, a ten-pack of 5.25" 35-track SSSD floppies (held a whole 85k each) was $39.95 in dollars that have since inflated a lot.  Almost two years later, we started selling hard drives at $500 per megabyte, and them things was gimongous in footprint and power consumption.

Of course, 8" virgin floppies ($79.95 for SSDD when I started) now cost a lot more than then, inflation notwithstanding, since tortoises have been hatched and died of old age since manufacture stopped.  Those few that have them know that those of us who need them need them_bad_.

I coulda-shoulda-woulda stocked up on those items at the market trough.  I'm not that smart or precognitive.

The only (nearly) perfect storage medium is carving it into hard rock (granite is good, basalt is better), then figuring a way to protect that rock from erosion, vulcanism, plate subsidence or asteroid impact.  (Not counting when the Sun goes Red Giant a few (billion) years hence).  Best chance is off-site storage (in a solar system with a longer-lived star, either a Red Dwarf that will never get excited or a White Dwarf that has already done the blow-up stuff and can't do it again).  Entropy will get it all, eventually.  The data may still be there fifty trillion years along, but there will be no light to see it by.  Them of you as thinks the universe ends sooner (I'm talking to the ones hoping for the Rapture -- I'm hoping for it too, so the rest of us who are "Left Behind" can actually get something done), adjust your storage strategies accordingly.

Oops, I'm still drinking.  Neither proud nor ashamed of it.  But I said I'd just read, not respond, so mark me ashamed.
-- 
Ward Griffiths        wdg3rd at comcast.net

<home.comcast.net/~wdg3rd>