Found a box of old floppy disks in my dad's attic and one actually worked

I was cleaning out his place in Toledo last weekend and found a whole plastic tub labeled 'computer stuff, 1992'. Inside were about 50 3.5-inch floppies. I figured they were all toast, but I dug out my old Windows 98 machine from the garage. After three tries, the drive finally read one disk. It had a bunch of text files from a college project he never told me about. The sound of that drive clicking and spinning up after all that time was wild. Has anyone else had luck recovering data from disks that old without special gear?

2 comments

2 Comments

sethc1220d ago

You said the sound of that drive spinning up was wild. I actually find that sound kind of sad. It's like a ghost from a dead tech era. I've got a few old disks too, but all I ever pulled off were some corrupted game saves and a shopping list. Makes you wonder if most of what we're saving now will even be readable in 30 years.

the_anthony20d ago

Yeah the "ghost from a dead tech era" part hits hard. My buddy found a whole zip drive in his dad's attic, spent a weekend trying to get it working. He finally got it to read and it was just one file, a half finished novel his dad wrote in the 90s. He said it felt like finding a message in a bottle that was meant for nobody. Kinda makes all my cloud storage feel like writing on fog.