Ian> --- On Tue, 2/24/09, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: Ian> Hehe. I've actually done this before too. I forget if I used Ian> water or alcohol though. After drying the disk, I put it into a Ian> clean sleeve and stuck it into the drive. Worked just fine. Alcohol would work. I've seen it done to a hard drive (a 1311 drive on an IBM 1620, after the head actuator in the drive sprung a leak and sprayed hydraulic fluid all over the pack and heads). No problem. And then there were DECtapes (the real ones, not the TU58). Those sometimes ended up in the laundry by accident and were none the worse for wear. That tape is laminated, though; the oxide is under a mylar cover layer. paul

David> On Tue, 24 Feb 2009, Paul Koning wrote: David> Given that, why aren't other mylar magnetic media similarly David> laminated? Expense? Interesting question. It's bound to be more expensive, yes. I suspect it was a case of "good enough". 1/2 inch magtape existed before, and was ok for secondary storage. The industry standard was set, and it used plain old non-laminated tape, and that worked fine for offline data and the like. DECtape needed to be tougher because it was meant as a substitute for disk. And it delivered. I met people at DEC who believed that it was impossible for DECtape to wear out. That isn't true -- I saw it happen at my college -- but it most definitely was a very rare event. paul

DECtape. Don't know of others. paul

the Bitsavers has assorted DECtape documents, including a spec of the media. It says the coating is 0.04 mil thick, so the magnetic media don't move away much. Density is quoted as 375 dpi, give or take, in a 1964 article also on Bitsavers. paul

Mr Ian Primus wrote: Back in college, a friend had a cheap 'card' table.... well... it had a small hole in it.... in the center... which due to age formed the low point.... he spilled milk from his cereal one AM... guess what was underneath.... all his C64 disks in a disk box.... milk and floppies anyone ? I opened the sleaves of all the disks that were 'contaminated', washed the disks themselves, used a jacket from a new floppy and he copied all the disks to new disks.... no data lost. I still have the disks somewhere (with no jackets :-) ). I believe we just used water... no soap/etc. -- Curt

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Michael Lee <mikelee at tdh.com> wrote: When I was in middle school, our school had a computer room full of apple 2es donated by apple. During recesses and lunches, we could go in there and do whatever we wanted on the computers. A lot of us were required to use the computers to type papers. So we had 5.25" floppies to save our work. Kids who were new to computers kept their disk in a text book, like a book mark, thinking it would keep them safe. It ended up flattening the outer jacket to the point where the disk couldn't spin anymore. In those cases, we'd do the same thing. Cut it open and put it in the jacket from another disk so we could retrieve the data. I was always surprised by how robust they were. They seemed indestructible. brian

Yes, I've seen that happen too... The few times I had to retreive data from such disks, I just ripped the jacket open on one side, slid out the actual magnetic disk, and 'mounted a naked floppy' -- that is, I removed the cover from the disk drive unit, slid the circlar magnetic disk in (no jacket), centered it over the spindle clamped it. And the, of course, backed it up to a new disk. -tony