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Re:The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old fl... by noufalibrahim on Thursday October 16, 2025 @10:24AM (#45605755)
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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9xNzZMeX5I

Re:The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old fl... by Cthulhu_ on Thursday October 16, 2025 @10:32AM (#45605834)
> original prince of persia source code from the sands of time.

I see what you did there

Re:The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old fl... by noufalibrahim on Thursday October 16, 2025 @03:16PM (#45609519)
Had to be said. I believe that was the title of the original talk too
Re:The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old fl... by 2mlWQbCK on Thursday October 16, 2025 @02:43PM (#45609132)
> My oldest programs in gw basic are on 5.25" DD disks

Mine as well, but luckily many years ago I copied all the contents of my old floppies to CD-ROMs, and then later all the CD-ROMs to DVDs, and finally to USB-harddisks, and now all the files live happily (hopefully forever) in my hoard ZFS (and several off-site backups).

The only significant exception is most 1.2 MB floppies. Those were also 5.25", but the drives were much more difficult to calibrate well. Can't get the files from almost any of those. A few I can list the filenames, but not access the file contents. Most are just unreadable. I could not even find a drive that worked well enough to copy those using my KryoFlux.

(* Not that there is anything at all of real value on all those old floppies. This is pure nostalgia/hoarding.)