Tag: floppy disks

  1. Notes on using the Kryoflux DiskTool utility to make archival images of floppy disks.

    01 June 2017

    Some time ago, I found myself using a Kryoflux interface and a couple of old floppy drives that had been kicking around in my workshop for a while to rip disk images of a colleague's floppy disk collection.  It took me a day or two of screwing around to figure out how to use the Kryoflux's software to make it do what I wanted.  Of course, I took notes along the way so that I would have something to refer back to later.  Recently, I decided that it would probably be helpful to people if I put those notes online …

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  2. Maybe I should write about things other than myself for a while.

    11 October 2008

    If you're involved in the retrocomputing or PC history scenes, chances are you've heard of double-sided floppy disks that are formatted for one system on side A and another system on side B. For example, I've got a copy of the game Ninja which had the C-64 version of the game on one side and the Atari port on the other. At the time this was a pretty straightforward thing to do because drives only read one side of a disk at a time. A couple of weeks back, PC historian Trixter came across a highly unusual 5 1/4 …

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  3. FIXED: A late 20th century grimoire?

    30 March 2007

    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 …

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