Floppy Disks

I opened a desk drawer today and found four 3.5 floppy disks. Each has to be almost twenty years old, relics from college yesteryear. I remember going to the computer lab, disk in hand, writing pascal computer programs. Many times, I burnt the midnight oil crafting research papers due the next morning.

Yes, there is nothing like waiting until the last minute.

Still, I have little recollection of what’s on these disks. I’m not sure I want to know. The .doc files are probably five versions back and computer labs were notorious for hosting all kinds of viruses. I wonder what an old virus would do to a modern-day computer. So, do you order the external drive and do a little digging? Or, do you leave the plastic squares?

Sometimes, maybe mysteries should remain unsolved.

References

• The distributed nature of old technology leaves electronic fingerprints in odd places. But I am getting closer, the header picture is a portable disk drive. Grant, this may only leverage the super drive concept started from the Iomega days. Now, that was a disk drive and remains available on eBay to this day.
• On the virus front, the old timers were built for a different age. Operating systems evolve. Computer viruses do too.