2 Nov
2010
2 Nov
'10
3:18 p.m.
On 2 Nov 2010 at 17:25, Ethan Dicks wrote:
That's the tried-and-true way of reading a
diskette that's had Coke
spilled on it. After the world switched to 3.5" floppies, doing these
sorts of things (mostly) faded into the mists.
Years ago, my little group using an Intel MDS-800 finished up a
compiler project way ahead of schedule. Management was so impressed
that they had T-shirts printed up and threw us a party, complete with
(really cheap) champagne. (I still have the T-shirt, but it doesn't
fit me anymore.)
We had the source code 8" floppies on a little shrine sort of display
so better to appreciate what we'd done. And no, we didn't have a
master backup of the thing, although we might have been able to
recreate it with bits from various people's private copies.
About a half-hour into the shindig, someone knocked a full glass of
bubbly onto the floppies and thoroughly saturated them. Very sticky
stuff.
We removed the cookies from their jackets, took them to the men's
lav, washed them in the sink and wiped them dry with paper towels
right out of the dispenser and stuck the floppies into new jackets.
No harm done.
It was THEN that we made a set of backups...
SSSD floppies were TOUGH. To the best of my recollection, they were
brown-box Dysans.
--Chuck