It occurs to me that some people who read my weblog might not know my twitter feed. I’ve been there for years, but it doesn’t come up here all that much. Perhaps not surprisingly, the feed’s name is @textfiles. I’m rangy, weird, abrasive, occasionally helpful and informative. You know, like usual. Check it out.

Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me.

It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care. You didn’t do anything and it’s too late now.

I’m talking about Floppy Disks. And I mean the five-and-a-quarter (5 1/4″) floppy disks that actually are somewhat floppy and which are long and flat and which were the mainstay of home computing for well up and over a decade, back then. A decade, I hope I’ve made clear, that means quite a bit to me. And the history, the thoughts and dreams and knowledge and information that people put onto those floppy disks with a grinding noise and a large LED lighting up and flickering? It’s gone. Three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks, which are not really floppy at all and which got a real hayday in the waning years of the 1980s and the 1990s? Not as gone as the fives but definitely in bed in the ward that things go into but don’ t really come out of, but which you can still visit, if you remember to.

If you still have boxes of floppies sitting in your attic or basement or grandparents’ place or wherever else, I’m telling you the days of it being a semi-dependable storehouse are over. It’s been too long, too much, and you’ve asked too much of what the floppies were ever designed to do. If you or someone helping you gets data off of it, then it’s luck and chance, not engineering and proper expectation. A lot of promises were made back then, very big promises about the dependability, and by most standards, those promises came out pretty darn good – it has often been the case of extracting data from floppies long after the company that wrote the software, that made the computer, that manufactured the disk drive parts, and manufactured the disk have gone into the Great Not Here.  You could be a totally different person, with people who you helped create running around your feet and many years younger than these floppies, and you could pull data off them to show the little people what their parent was up to so long ago. Maybe even get them excited about their turn at the screen and keyboard when the time came. It was like getting two sodas for one buck out of the soda machine. Cool!

No longer. Edge cases exist, and will always exist, but the ship is sinking; it’s not seaworthy. With some perseverance and faced against all the odds stacked against you, something might get out of these poor black squares, but I would not count on it.

Why am I telling you this?

I am telling you this because I am grabbing you by the fucking collar and shaking very hard because it is obvious you need to be shaken very hard and told that this is it. This is the endgame for floppies. We went over the hump, and the chances of rescue are slim to none now, but there are still chances. It’s a chance that needs to be taken now.

If you have an archive or cache or hoard of floppies, you need to get in touch with me. I will help get the data off of them for you, whatever piecemeal amount is still thriving on there. We’ll get errors up the wazoo, and some of them will be simply unreasonable, but it has to be done, I have to try.

Archiving history is now my full time job. Let me tell you how much I love that. I love it THIS MUCH.

So I’m throwing myself into the fire. I have people who have said they’ll step forward and help this happen. We can transfer the data off the floppies, get a hold of history before it goes into the zero device.  Get in touch with me.

And please, one other group.

There are libraries, archives and collections out there with floppies. They probably never got funding or time to take the data off – there’s a great chance the floppies are considered plain old acquisition items and objects, like books or a brooch or a duvet cover. They’re not. They’re temporary storage spaces for precious data that has faded beyond retrieval. If nobody got around to pulling that information off, then a fundamental goal of many of these places dissolved under their noses and they’ve failed. I’m willing to forgive and forget, myself, if we can just ferret out these caches and help the items get into a more stable state. (As an aside, the conclusions of this study are wrong, although I appreciate the effort.)

Help me with this, before it’s too late. Because it is too late.

Help me now.

Update: There’s now a page on the Archive Team Wiki that I have created to give people options and information about the transfer of floppy disks into a more modern storage location.  Please read or contribute.

I’ve been a little busy, doing a little travelling for the summer.

When I get back home this weekend, I’ll be kicking things into full gear with my work with Archive Team, Archive.org, GDC, and other projects. But let me mention a few things worth going into that I did while globetrotting.

The Arcade Manuals Archive has been getting the love from the growing Metadata Warriors (and there’s always room for more warriors, by the way). If you track the RSS feed for the collection, you can see it grow. Since I find arcade manuals massively fascinating, it’s like a fountain of awesomeness for me. If it’s not quite as fascinating for you, you can still look it over and see how things are going. And if that’s too much work, hey, Nintendo Light Gun maintenance manual. Who can argue with a light gun manual?

Enough GET LAMP interviews have been rendered, uploaded, and described that it was finally time to announce the GET LAMP Interviews Archives are now a “thing” on archive.org. Ten are up as of this writing and I’ve got a machine rendering high-definition, video-noise-reduced clip sets for you to watch at your leisure, assuming you want more thoughts from the people I had in the movies. Perhaps Jim Aspnes, the creator of TinyMUD,  jumps out at you, but there’s also Lance Micklus, who was a software author and who ran a company during the opening age of the home computer industry. And more! What a great deal!

And the Bitsavers collection is heading up the rear, although I expect it’ll get up some steam anytime soon.  Until it gets more, though, it’ll have to do with such items as the 2nd West Coast Computer Faire Proceedings, or the instructions for the Ohio Scientific 8K BASIC-in-ROM. And occasionally thumbing through the Commodore Component catalog.

So, more to come, after I land back in the US of A in a couple days. I’m refreshed, energized and ready to go.