36 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
36 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
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Sloppy Floppies
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Reprinted from the Fresno Commodore User Group
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Who would've imagined the abuse that could be heaped on a little floppy disk.
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Three month's ago, Polaroid Corp. kicked off a multi- million dollar
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advertising campaign in 25 publications offering to clean Polaroid disks that
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get mucked up and unreadable to a computer. Polaroid, which touts its
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on-of-a-kind cleaning technique, expected to receive disks with a couple of
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coffee or jelly donut stains from a few clumsy programmers. What it got were
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major messes from some high-tech skeptics.
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Compute! Publications sent a disk that had been frozen in a block of ice,
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thawed out by a microwave oven, scrawled on with a ballpoint pen and then
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stapled several times. Using three chemicals to clean it and a $100,000 device
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(which the company declined to describe in detail) Polaroid retrieved 90% of
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the data. The remaining data was ruined because the staples had poked holes in
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the disk. In all other cases, 100% of the data was saved.
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A few of the other tortures Polaroid disks were subjected to:
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* Trade journal PC Week dumped a hot fudge sundae on its disk.
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* A Boston consulting firm sent a saliva-covered disk that was chewed by a
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golden retriever
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Is this the beginning of media with a memory?
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((No, that was Panty Hose with a Memory))
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How about disks that never forget?
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((No, those are ELEPHANTs!))
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Maybe Polaroid just hid a snapshot feature in all their floppies???
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