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How Amiga hackers saved Andy Warhol's digital images
A new documentary from the HIllman Photography Iniative (see the video below) has revealed exactly how those now-famous Andy Warhol Amiga works were extracted from decrepit 3.5-inch floppies. First, researchers had to figure out that the image files were actually saved on the original graphics program diskettes due to quirks in the early Amiga 1000 system. Once the disks were found, Amiga forensics specialists wanted to be the last people to touch them for the sake of their preservation. Since the magnetic material was separating from the substrate, they made sure to read the floppies just once to create a disk image. From there, they used an Amiga emulator to dive into the filesystem, with the "Eureka!" moment coming when they saw filenames like "campbells.pic" and "marilyn1.pic." A quick conversion later, and the images appeared -- as dramatic a moment for the programmers as spotting a Warhold painting at a flea market.
Writer breaks down floppy drive history in detail, recalls the good sectors and the bad
There's been a lot of nostalgia circulating around the PC world in the past year, but there's only one element of early home computing history that everyone shares in common: the floppy drive. A guest writer posting at HP's Input Output blog, Steve Vaughan-Nichols, is acknowledging our shared sentimentality with a rare retrospective of those skinny magnetic disks from their beginning to their (effective) end. Many of us are familiar with the floppies that fed our Amigas, early Macs and IBM PCs; Vaughan-Nichols goes beyond that to address the frustrations that led to the first 8-inch floppy at IBM in 1967, the esoteric reasons behind the 5.25-inch size and other tidbits that might normally escape our memory. Don't be sad knowing that the floppy's story ends with a whimper, rather than a bang. Instead, be glad for the look back at a technology that arguably greased the wheels of the PC era, even if it sometimes led to getting more disks than you could ever use. Sorry about that. [Image credit: Al Pavangkanan, Flickr]
Sony shutting down Japanese floppy disk sales by March 2011, kills a tech dinosaur
Believe it or not, Sony managed to shift 12 million 3.5-inch floppy disks in Japan last year -- presumably to die-hard old schoolers. Alas, time waits for no one, and the venerable data transporter that started its life way back in 1981 is going to all but cease production by March of next year. Sony was the last of the major manufacturers to keep churning these bits of plastic out, but soon that too shall be no more. Having already shut down operations in most of the world, it's now noted the end of life for its domestic market, and thereby effectively consigned the floppy to the past. Good riddance, you might say, but we still remember fondly the wonder we experienced upon tearing apart our first 5.25-inch floppy disk. Ah well, the diskette goes the way of the cassette, guess that was predictable.
