A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

BBC From lectures by Stephen Hawking to the letters of British politician Neil Kinnock, archivists at Cambridge University are in a race against time to save the digital past stored on fragile floppy disks.Deep within Cambridge University Library lie some of the world’s most treasured artefacts — letters from Isaac Newton, notebooks by Charles Darwin, rare Islamic texts and fragments of the 200 BC Nash Papyrus containing the Ten Commandments. These manuscripts are preserved in climate-controlled rooms and handled with delicate care.When the library received 113 boxes from the office of physicist Stephen Hawking, however, staff faced a new preservation challenge — stacks of old floppy disks. Hidden among the papers and photographs were relics of the early computer age, holding data that might reveal unseen details of Hawking’s work and personality.The Future Nostalgia Project beginsThe disks form part of the library’s Future Nostalgia project, an effort to rescue information trapped on obsolete storage devices. “Most of the donations we get are from people who are either retiring or passing away,” says Leontien Talboom, who leads the project. “That means we’re seeing more and more things from the era of personal computing.”Floppy disks, once the backbone of data storage, may look sturdy beside parchment and paper, yet their contents are far more fragile. The iron oxide coating that stores magnetic data slowly deteriorates, risking permanent loss. “If you’ve got a book, it doesn’t matter how old it is — you can still read it,” Talboom says. “With floppy disks, you need specialised equipment, and even then you might not be able to interpret what’s inside.”A looming digital dark ageArchivists fear a coming “digital dark age”, where much of humanity’s recent history could vanish because devices and software become unreadable. To prevent this, Talboom’s team painstakingly reconstructs vintage computers and drives to extract data. Sometimes she even removes mould from degraded disks with surgical precision. “If people have kept them in garages or lofts, they can get mouldy,” she says.Her work has already yielded a mix of discoveries — from poetic drafts by Nicholas Moore to correspondence from paranormal societies. Yet Hawking’s disks remain her most meaningful find. “I was honoured to work on them,” she says.Hawking’s collection came through the UK’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme, which allows historically significant material to enter public archives. Among the papers were two sets of floppy disks — older 5.25-inch DOS-formatted disks and later 3.5-inch Mac versions. “They contain letters and lectures,” Talboom says. “From a technical point of view, his lectures were so large he had to split them across multiple disks.”Some of Hawking’s files also hold the software that powered his speech synthesiser, and even computer games he may have played — hints of his humour and humanity.The wild west of early computingFor today’s archivists, the variety of disk formats is a nightmare. “There wasn’t one system that dominated the market,” Talboom says. “It was a bit of a wild west out there.”To access them, the team scours the world for decades-old drives. “I bought my eight-inch drive off eBay,” says Chris Knowles, who works with the Churchill Archives Centre. His drive helped recover data from 200 disks once belonging to Neil Kinnock, Labour Party leader from 1983 to 1992. “At first we thought they only contained speeches,” Knowles says, “but some had personal correspondence with constituents.”Finding working drives is only half the battle. “Ten years ago, it would have been easier,” Talboom admits. “But a lot of this equipment is disappearing.”Among the rarest finds are three-inch Amstrad disks, once popular in Britain. “They’re difficult because the drives use different voltage systems,” she says. Her team had to build custom connectors and power cables just to read them.Even the software is fading from memory. “A lot of people who created these systems have retired or passed away,” Talboom explains. “So that knowledge is starting to be lost.”Knowles encountered this problem when trying to open files created with the long-defunct Diamond Word Processor. Without fan communities or preserved manuals, archivists often rely on trial and error.Translating code into historyPeter Rees of the Cambridge History of Innovation Project compares the task to translating ancient texts. “Philologists take Latin and make it readable today,” he says. “We’re doing the same with old code — using technical tools to decode and make it understandable.”The next step, Talboom notes, is making recovered data accessible to researchers. “Running old software on modern devices is challenging,” she says, meaning many recovered files still await public release.For now, the team’s priority is simply saving what can still be saved. “Many floppy disks are 40 or 50 years old,” Talboom says. “The magnetic material they’re written on is starting to degrade. We have to save them as quickly as possible.”To raise awareness, she hosted a public floppy-disk workshop at Cambridge University Library, inviting people to bring their own disks to uncover forgotten contents. Knowles says the public’s interest is natural: “People are fascinated by family history. This lets them rediscover things they thought were lost.”Rees believes the work could even reveal overlooked insights from great minds. “Old emails or work calendars may seem mundane,” he says. “But that’s how Newton or Darwin’s letters once looked. Now they’re priceless windows into the past.”The mystery that keeps archivists hookedSome of Talboom’s favourite disks are the early 5.25-inch ones — unpredictable relics that might contain anything. “People reused and overwrote them,” she explains. “The label can say one thing, but something else could be inside.”That sense of discovery drives her work. “When we receive paper archives, someone’s usually browsed through them already,” she says. “With floppy disks, I’m often the first person to see what’s inside in 40 years. It feels like uncovering a time capsule.”Rees agrees there’s a strange magic in handling forgotten technology. “Floppy disks remind us how alien the recent past can feel,” he says. “Each one carries a fragment of human memory waiting to be revived.”Read full article here: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251009-rescuing-knowledge-trapped-on-old-floppy-disks

A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

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Namibian Sun 2025-12-10

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A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks

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Namibian Sun 2025-12-10

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