Puzzle Description:

Dead media: A 5 1/4" Floppy Disk that I can't read anymore.

#1: Norma Dee (norm0908) on Apr 1, 2018

I remember being so thrilled when these came out. And then, will wonders never cease, they made it possible to record on BOTH sides.

Found to be solvable with moderate lookahead by infrapinklizzard.

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The problem with digital media is that you can't tell what's on it by just looking.

Books are readable, sometimes for longer than their language survives. Early photographs will last as long as their paper as well. While some digital media might last (but it's unlikely), the formats of the data could well be forgotten (and they're more cryptic than lost languages).

As everything changes, we could find huge swathes of our cultural history lost as the hardware needed to read it becomes obsolete, and then broken (and unrepairable as the components used to make it are obsolete and unavailable), and then just plain gone.

Yep, that's an OLD floppy!

Somewhere I have one of my father-in-law's 8-inch "elephant" floppy. I think it holds a whopping 80K.

If I recall correctly, I seem to remember the floppies having dire warnings about how not to treat your floppy. So when one went bad, people would take great delight in bending it, getting fingerprints all over it, rubbing it in the dirt, etc,

Fun.

I still have some of these. (Don't ask me why.) And until recently, I had a computer that could read them.

Great comment, Joe.

Really fun puzzle, Jim.

I'm pretty sure I've got some of these lying around somewhere too.

The dire warnings Norma Dee talks about were subverted by the Beagle Brothers. The jokes of how not to treat floppies seem to hold up even today. (If the link ever goes dead, just google Beagle Brothers dire warnings.)

https://medium.com/@chrisdesalvo/these-warnings-used-to-be-on-the-floppy-disk-sleeves-of-beagle-brothers-products-in-the-1980s-f98ba1feb065

:)

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