

In which I resurrect a 13 yo 3.5" floppy disk and reprint my doctoral thesis  - jgrahamc
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/08/in-which-i-resurrect-13-year-old-35.html

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zandorg
I recently was compiling my old stories (I've written fiction since I was 7),
to go in a book. Some of the stories were typed or printed in a courier font,
and I either used OCR software or typed it in by hand.

Some were on a hard drive backup (from a 286 PC with Wordperfect 5.1) from
1996.

The most bizarre thing, though, was stories I'd sent to friends over email,
and then lost the original files somehow. I was able to run a search and find
4 (!) stories like this, in my email archive.

Sadly, in 1999 I broke a C64 disk which contained a few little bits of
stories, so in this case, the paper outlasted the magnetic.

But now I have a 794-page hardback book (acid-free paper I think) of stories
to put somewhere safe.

~~~
gecko
I appreciate this is off-topic, but I've thought of doing the same thing for
the same reason. May I ask where you found that was willing to do a high-
quality one-off hard-bound print? I know of several storefronts that do either
large runs, or only do paperback; just not one-off hard-bound editions.

~~~
zandorg
Lulu.com. A one-off 794 page volume costs £20 a copy and postage (though
irrelevant when ordering in bulk) is about £6. It scales in that 794 pages
costs little more than 250, except the limit is 800 (a paperback's limit is I
think 500)

The hardback has a colour dust jacket which goes right round the book and with
inside flaps, and quite classy: there is gold lettering on the hardback
itself! It looks like a 'real' book.

As for acid-free, I'm not 100% sure, but a book I printed a year ago isn't
going brown.

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brandon272
In 20 years: "In which I attempt to remember my Google Docs account and
reprint my doctoral thesis"

~~~
oconnor0
I wonder if Google Docs will still be around & accessible in 20 years.

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jacquesm
Congratulations! :)

I was wondering how it turned out. No problems at all then. Did you verify the
whole floppy or just those files ?

Nearer the hub they tend to get harder to read.

~~~
pieter
I'd guess everything worked fine, as he was able to unzip the single zip file
on the floppy.

~~~
jgrahamc
Yes, the ZIP file was perfectly intact and there was nothing else on the
floppy. It's worth noting the size of the ZIP file: it took up almost the
entire disk.

~~~
unexpected
I'm just curious, but what did the README files contain? You seem to be really
organized!

~~~
jgrahamc
If you look at the screenshot in the blog post you can see a couple of them.
The top level one described briefly what the ZIP file contained and then
further down there were files given information about the subdirectories and
things like the file extensions used.

In one directory there was a file describing how I had compressed the SunOS
file names into 8.5 DOS names. Pretty important because the LaTeX files
referenced the long names.

There was also an interesting file called MACROS. It contained a note saying
that it was meant to be a symlink to a different directory (also called
MACROS) but since DOS didn't support symlinks...

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Luc
I've done this with 20 year old C64 floppies, and most of them worked fine.
There were some intermittent errors, but it's hard to say if that was the
floppies or the notoriously finicky floppy drives.

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tobii
So you think you found a good reason to show us your cv and your thesis ....

