Comments on: Old floppies http://rogerbourland.com/blog/2008/06/19/old-floppies/ Roger Bourland writes about music and life Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:13:19 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Brad Wood http://rogerbourland.com/blog/2008/06/19/old-floppies/#comment-80772 Brad Wood Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:03:49 +0000 http://rogerbourland.com/blog/2008/06/19/old-floppies/#comment-80772 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. 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.

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