4 Feb
2007
4 Feb
'07
11:18 a.m.
On 4 Feb 2007 at 0:24, Tony Duell wrote:
Incidentally, I heard a news item a few days ago that
'PC World' (a chain
of computer shops in the UK) will no longer be selling floppy disks once
their current stocks run out. Apparently USB sticks store more data and
are more conveneint (well, the first is true, but irrelevant if you only
need to store a few kilobytes, the second is definitely false if your
machine doesn't have a USB port).
This is bad news from a preservation standpoint.
I've done plenty of work converting diskettes that say "Letters to
Mom 1981" and that sort of thing. Small collections of small
documents on media inexpensive and easy enough to use that the cost
of preservation is negligible.
Neither CD-ROM nor USB sticks satisfy this need. Storage in the case
of CD is 650+ MB and time-consuming enough that one doesn't think of
it as a way of casually preserving a 2 or 3 KB document. USB sticks
are expensive and large enough that they'll get reused regularly.
As strange as it seems, I think we lost a lot of personal
correspondence when hard disks became the rule on PC systems. Folks
didn't ordinarily think to back things up and when the computer
departed, so did the hard disk and its contents.
It's interesting to note that I probably have a copy of everything I
did between 1976-1985 on diskette. After that, there are huge holes
from omission or unreliable backup media. I suspect
that after the
final exit of the floppy, that the holes will probably grow larger.
There has even been dicussion about leaving hard disks off of
internet-conencted PCs entirely (see the XO laptop, for example)
because network storage is available. Should that trend extend to
personal computers, then the holes will grow even larger.
Cheers,
Chuck