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FIXED: A late 20th century grimoire?

Friday 30 March 2007 at 1:08 pm
This is one of the neatest art hacks I've seen in a while. Let me explain:

Books are ultimately tools for storing information in a non-volatile manner for ease of transportation and reference. They're a relatively low bandwidth medium, limited by how fast the reader can turn the pages and the rate at which the visual cortex processes the characters, but are remarkably stable. Diskettes, on the other hand, are a more informationally dense storage medium, weigh less, and take up less space. They are more vulnerable to mistreatment, however: A fingerprint in the wrong place can wipe out large quantities of data by corrupting the file system, and they are sensitive to forces in the environment (such as magnetism) that the printed word ignores.

Somebody named James Downey figured that the best of both worlds would be a book that contains a diskette drive and floppy disk, and so combined the two. The 5.25 inch floppy drive he used is fully operational, it only needs to be connected to a computer, and the disk is capable of storing data.

Maybe I'm just being parochial, but this sort of thing brings a smile to my face.

Used tags: art_hacks, bookbinding, computers, drives, floppy_disks, hardware

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four comments recorded.

would be…..?

`Lex (URL) - 30 03 07 - 15:03 - Reply to comment?

Sorry! Fixed.. I suck.

The Doctor (URL) - 30 03 07 - 16:08 - Reply to comment?

floppy disks manufactured in this day and age suck compared to their counterparts of yester-year.

y’know, it’s funny… you can go and buy some 3.5” floppy disks from office depot (or wherever) and know that they might be in ‘track 0 bad – disk unusable’ condition in less than a week — the medium is no longer reliable for storage at all. and yet, i’ve still got 5.25” disks from 20 years ago that still read and write just fine. hell, i have friends that have drives which use 8” disks that STILL werk great, and i don’t think 8” disks have been made since about 1983 or 1984.

you’d think that as time went on, magnetic media would have seen much more amazing advancements as far as reliability. nowadays they’re pretty much ‘use once and toss’ items.

they sure don’t make ‘em like they used to.

—darien!

darien! - 30 03 07 - 22:36 - Reply to comment?

I’ve never run into that before.. then again, I haven’t used floppy disks in better than four years, but occasionally I’ll come across one. I’ve run into more bad blank CD’s right out of the box than anything else, and even then there were very few of them (I can count them on one hand).

I’m fairly certain that the 5.25 inch floppies I have for my Commodores and Ataris are still readable. I’m pretty sure that my remaining 3.5 inch floppies are still readable.

That sounds about right for eight inch floppies. The ones I have are branded 1984 at the very latest, 1981 at the earliest.

Nope. No reason to. USB keys and blank CDs have all but replaced them. Hasufin and I had a discussion about this a couple of days ago – USB keys haven’t really perfectly replaced floppies because they’re not so cheap that you can get a bad one, throw it away without thinking about it, and get a new one without having to stop and think about the price. They’re as cheap as $5us in stores but not dirt cheap yet.

The Doctor (URL) - 03 04 07 - 09:47 - Reply to comment?

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