Within the past few days, someone commented with a link to "Floppy Disks: It's Too Late" (2011) from Jason Scott's blog.<p>Here's an excerpt:<p><pre><code> It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or
made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care.
You didn’t do anything and it’s too late now. ...
If you still have boxes of floppies sitting in your
attic or basement or grandparents’ place or wherever
else, I’m telling you the days of it being a semi-
dependable storehouse are over. It’s been too long, too
much, and you’ve asked too much of what the floppies
were ever designed to do.
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191
</code></pre>
That's for 5 1/4" disks.<p>The situation sounds more hopeful for 3 1/2" disks - but if you still have some, now is the time to get that data off.
Please for God's sake digitize the whole lot.. there is an entire history of a barely documented civilization on these disks, and it reminds me of something else:<p>BBS operators of the 80s and 90s, where are the copies of those hard drives that you took out of that 286 before you binned it? Google may have bought and destroyed Dejanews, but you're hoarding something much more valuable (IMHO!)
Can someone (OP?) please ask this user to upload this content to the Internet Archive (archive.org)? They <i>love</i> this kind of stuff, and it'll be stored much more permanently there than it would be in a random Dropbox account.
Here is the biggest retro moment for me already from this archive...<p><a href="http://imgur.com/qyFVUid" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/qyFVUid</a><p>I still remember the sound of my 2400baud modem disconnecting from call waiting. I had a large collection of half complete images.
I had a bunch of IBM Big Blue Disks, and now I can only find a couple on shady sites. Someone must have more because all of the Alfredo animation demos are on YouTube. Perhaps I should send them a message. I got ahold of the current owners of Softdisk but they didn't have an archive. Oh well... Perhaps some things are just meant to be lost. Maybe any IBM people can nose around corporate archives?
.arc... Vague recollection of CP/M context?<p>Depending upon age of content, you might want to look for one of the DOS-based CP/M emulators in there. I recall one called... Nice22, I think. There were others.<p>--<p>Quick search turned this up:<p>CP/M Frequently Asked Questions: Q20: How do you unpack a .ARK or .ARC file?<p><a href="http://www.gaby.de/faq.htm#20" rel="nofollow">http://www.gaby.de/faq.htm#20</a>
Wonder if it has this gem from my childhood: <a href="http://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/w/wall-pipe-2ep/wall-pipe_3.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/w/wall-pipe-2...</a>
Another modern and Linux friendly option that reads floppies like floppies and not like seemingly random bits of magnetism vaguely resembling data.<p><a href="http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html</a>