CDC floppy disks on Ebay.

[Fred Cisin]

> At 02:29 PM 9/12/2018 -0800, Al wrote:
>> I will be bidding on these
On Mon, 10 Dec 2018, Guy Dunphy via cctalk wrote:
> I hope you get them. Cheaply.
> And if so, please let us know if the data was recoverable. I have some quite old
> floppies to someday get around to attempting to recover. Really curious to see
> whether floppies suffer 'data evaporation' over time or not.

Disks of that time period tend to do well.
Some later disks didn't fare so well, such as Wabash, or Verbatim BEFORE 
DATALIFE.

> FWIW, years ago a friend of mine found some important floppies of his had all
> developped mold on the magnetic surfaces. Which fouled read heads, making them
> useless. We found that slitting open the covers, taking out the disks and
> literally washing them in the bathtub with soap and water, drying, then putting
> back in the covers, worked!

and sometimes gentle baking can help
(think food dehydrator)

I have encountered a lot of disks that were not stored exceptionally well, 
that had developed difficulty turning in the jackets.
Rubbing each edge of the jacket firmly perpendicularly against the edge of 
a tabletop, so that the jacket bowed out SLIGHTLY, often helped 
substantially.  Then you can usually turn the cookie in the jacket with 
fingers through the center hole.

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com