Yes, Athana is the one Vendor I found who still manufacturers new floppy disks and other media packs. Maybe we should invite them to display/sell at VCFe. On Wednesday, December 30, 2015, Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 12/29/2015 10:16 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
We cannot keep the hardware functioning for 10000 years, or even 100 years. There are rubber and plastic components in a lot of this stuff, and they are slowly deteriorating, depolymerizing, and falling to bits.
Our only hope in that are is that accessible, inexpensive, low-volume manufacturing techniques, such as 3D printing, mature quickly enough for us to be able to replace those components.
Ugh. I haven't bottom posted since my FidoNet days.. feels.. wrong.
Anyway, there are some wonderful analogies in the music world. My family had a wonderful Steinway B piano from the 1930s and I was absolutely convinced we would keep it in the family for another 100 years until my repairman explained that pianos just don't last that long. The famous example is Beethoven's piano, from the early 1800s, which is kept loosely strung and thus cannot be played at all. To do otherwise would risk severe, if not permanent, damage to the piano since the frames are under such a massive amount of tension. I've also seen 300 year old violins completely reconstructed to be essentially brand new. Violins worth $300,000 and more. At the same time, there is a set of Stradivari instruments at the Met Museum worth literally millions of dollars under glass.
It is only a matter of time until we will have to decide whether computer museums are for using vintage computers or looking at vintage computers. My take is to have one of each under glass for viewing and, by whatever means necessary, make the other ones work.. a living museum, if you will. I seem to recall the Computer Museum in Mountain View is heading in this direction with several items under museum glass. Too much so, if you ask me, but they get extra points for having a working PDP running Spacewar.
I don't see people making modern replicas of floppy disk drives (economies of scale barely support the SD card etc. solutions), but I didn't like floppy drives when they were cutting edge technology, either. So we might be looking at the very real possibility that we can show computers exactly as they looked, but can't use them exactly as they were used, much like Beethoven's piano.
And I say this as someone who takes much joy out of showing every one of his high school students what it sounds and looks like to boot 8bit machines with floppy disks.
Best wishes,
-Adam
--- Adam Michlin Computer Science Teacher Pope John XXIII Regional High School Sparta, NJ Administrator: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cptrsci/
-- Normal Person: Hey, it seems that you know a lot. Geek: To be honest, it's due to all the surfing I do. Normal Person: So you go surfing? Normal Person: But I don't think that has anything to do with knowing a lot... Geek: I think that's wrong on a fundamental level. Normal Person: Huh? Huh? What?