rss feedOld floppies
I had a graduate student help me with an interesting project. I have a lot of MIDI files on my old 1980s IBM-AT PC computer, including all the accompaniments for all my GALA cantatas (HIDDEN LEGACIES, LETTERS TO THE FUTURE, and FLASHPOINT/STONEWALL) as well as all my portable pieces (PORTABLE CONCERTO, SHASTA, MIRABEL, and GLAMOUR AND EROS). The accompaniments would have been lost forever, but the computer still runs, and we were able to get the MIDI files extracted from the hard drive. We had to store them on 5.25 floppy disks (remember those?), and send them to a company to have them read, and then they emailed the files to me. It will be a lot of work reorchestrating all that music, but it will be a lot easier now having the basic musical information in these recovered files.
Oy, this brave new world!
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From my days with the photodiode array spectrometer I developed at UCLA, I continue to hang on to a box of 8″ floppies with observational data from various telescopes the instrument was attached to. The likelihood of those bad boys ever being read again is small indeed, although fortunately I have printouts of the data in graphical form that could be used if anyone ever wanted to see them.
The floppies are so big they give one a strange feeling to hold, rather like one of those routines with Lily Tomlin sitting on an enormous chair while playing a child.
The detector system was remarkably reliable, considering it was hand-built with a gazillion parts and had lots of “invention on the critical path”. What finally disabled it: failure of the floppy drives!
The instrument is probably down somewhere in a storeroom on the first floor of the Math-Sciences Annex (if that place is even still called that), taking up valuable space that could be used for other purposes. However, I’m sure if I expressed an interest in it, they would deny me access.