Elephant Memory Systems tribute page

I took a quick look at some of my oldest (late 1970's) 5.25" 100 tpi diskettes that are still readable. Mostly Dysan, with a few CDC "Precision" blue-on-white diskettes and a few Dennison Kybe (whoever made those). Maybe 2 or 3 3M. Not a single Elephant in the lot, though I certainly purchased a few boxes back then. No Verbatims either. The funny thing is that I recall picking up a whole mess of CDC diskettes when CDC closed their retail operation and had a "going out of business" sale. I don't think I have a single one of those diskettes--all of the manufacturer's labels dried up and fell off, so I can't be sure. There was some pretty awful merchandise available at that time, however. I recall a mail-order outfit that sold unbranded diskettes for very cheap. In a lot, you could find several different heat-sealing patterns on the jackets and the cookies might even be slightly different colors. I'd suspected that they might be nothing more than floor sweepings from a couple of the major manufacturers. I recall a customer calling us with a very baffling problem, claiming that our copying software did not make reliable copies (we did a read after write). After banging my head on the desk for a few days, I finally asked the customer to send me some of these copies. Turned out that these were from the aforementioned mail order outfit and each diskette (these were DSDD 360K) had TWO hub rings installed--one right over the other, just slightly offset. Naturally, there was little chance that the diskettes would seat the same way with any two insertions. When I informed the customer of the problem, he was irate that we hadn't somehow picked the problem up in the software.... Some days you just can't win. Cheers, Chuck