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Back in high school in ye olden days of 2003, the trick was to put a powerful magnet on your floppy disk prior to turning in the assignment. Floppy disk failure

Back in high school in ye olden days of 2003, the trick was to put a powerful magnet on your floppy disk prior to turning in the assignment. Floppy disk failures weren’t too uncommon, so it was hard to prove intent. Frankly I’m amazed computers were trusted by anybody back then. Imagine if iCloud randomly corrupted 1 in 100 photos.

endymi0n 5y ago
Seriously, the magic of error correction is hardly appreciated or noted by younger hackers these days. I had one important project (I don‘t remember anymore which one it was), so I put it on THREE 3,5‘‘ disks, one after each other. All three were unreadable by the time I arrived. I was devastated. (note I had heard stories about rotating current brakes ruining disks so I took care not to go by rail, must have been something else)
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Either the drive you wrote the disks on, or the drive you used to read them, were misaligned. Putting the disks back in the original drive and they probably would have been readable.
  - scsilver 5y ago
    And they computers don't have a sense of humor.
- bambax 5y ago
  Not exactly the same story, but there was this one time when I was working on a long document, several days work, on an Amstrad PPC 640 (this was the early 90s). Saving the file on a floppy took around 1 minute I think (maybe more) so I didn't do it often and had no copy or backup of any kind. It was around midnight, I was done and hit save. I had an external monitor, and for no particular reason, decided to move it around during the save. It was big and heavy, and while moving it I accidentally hit the power switch of the PC. Powering off the machine during disk write destroyed everything. I couldn't believe it, I stared at the machine for a while. Then I spent the rest of the night recreating the document from memory, while making frequent copies on different disks. It was a horrible moment that I remember vividly, but it taught me a valuable lesson. I never again lost any file for lack of appropriate backup.
mulmen 5y ago
To be honest if iCloud corrupted 1% of my photos I’m not sure I would notice. 1.44 MB pretty much fits in my head. But “infinite” storage over 15 years now? How would I even audit that?
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  > 1.44 MB pretty much fits in my head. That the size of a zipped plain text bible. There are some people that knows the bible by heart, and I suppose if you work with it a lot, you have a general idea of the order of all things, and what's going on in each part without having to know the exact words. Like an essay you've been working on for months. So seems about right. Maybe it's time for a new metric: 1 floppy is what you can hold. More is too much.
  - orestarod 5y ago
    More like what you can hold as a single entity in your head. The sum of your knowledge is vastly more than that.
    - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      Yes. I can memorize so many docs and API, but there is a threshold for a project size above which I cannot hold the entire code base in my head.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
southerntofu 5y ago
You'd be surprised how much data "cloud" services lose or intentionally delete every year.

endymi0n 5y ago

Seriously, the magic of error correction is hardly appreciated or noted by younger hackers these days. I had one important project (I don‘t remember anymore which one it was), so I put it on THREE 3,5‘‘ disks, one after each other. All three were unreadable by the time I arrived. I was devastated. (note I had heard stories about rotating current brakes ruining disks so I took care not to go by rail, must have been something else)

londons_explore 5y ago
Either the drive you wrote the disks on, or the drive you used to read them, were misaligned. Putting the disks back in the original drive and they probably would have been readable.
- scsilver 5y ago
  And they computers don't have a sense of humor.
bambax 5y ago
Not exactly the same story, but there was this one time when I was working on a long document, several days work, on an Amstrad PPC 640 (this was the early 90s). Saving the file on a floppy took around 1 minute I think (maybe more) so I didn't do it often and had no copy or backup of any kind. It was around midnight, I was done and hit save. I had an external monitor, and for no particular reason, decided to move it around during the save. It was big and heavy, and while moving it I accidentally hit the power switch of the PC. Powering off the machine during disk write destroyed everything. I couldn't believe it, I stared at the machine for a while. Then I spent the rest of the night recreating the document from memory, while making frequent copies on different disks. It was a horrible moment that I remember vividly, but it taught me a valuable lesson. I never again lost any file for lack of appropriate backup.

mulmen 5y ago

To be honest if iCloud corrupted 1% of my photos I’m not sure I would notice. 1.44 MB pretty much fits in my head. But “infinite” storage over 15 years now? How would I even audit that?

BiteCode_dev 5y ago
> 1.44 MB pretty much fits in my head. That the size of a zipped plain text bible. There are some people that knows the bible by heart, and I suppose if you work with it a lot, you have a general idea of the order of all things, and what's going on in each part without having to know the exact words. Like an essay you've been working on for months. So seems about right. Maybe it's time for a new metric: 1 floppy is what you can hold. More is too much.
- orestarod 5y ago
  More like what you can hold as a single entity in your head. The sum of your knowledge is vastly more than that.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    Yes. I can memorize so many docs and API, but there is a threshold for a project size above which I cannot hold the entire code base in my head.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

southerntofu 5y ago

You'd be surprised how much data "cloud" services lose or intentionally delete every year.