[EN] When Bits Rot - with C McKean, L Talboom, A Page-Mitchell

English Edition: floppy disks, hard drives, CDs, DVDs, SSD drives - no matter what you choose to store your data on - ultimately they all decay. With my guests Callum McKean, Leontien Talboom and Adrian Page-Mitchell, we're going to talk about what kinds of data we find on old drives, why we want to get them in the first place, and what can go wrong with the storage media. To all of you who love all things retro - we'll be talking about floppy disks a bit. 

Links:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/APDF A format
• https://www.ibm.com/history/floppy-disk history of floppy disks
• https://www.domesday86.com/?page_id=2140 The BBC Domesday project
  • https://domesday.computinghistory.org.uk/
• https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/ The excellent Centre of Computing History in Cambridge, UK
• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4849567/stability of DVDs and CDs
• https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec5/how environmental conditions affect optical drives

Conference announcements

• https://rse.swiss/swiss_rse_day Swiss RSE Day, 31 August 2026
• https://www.researchsoft.org/irsc/ International Research Software Conference 7-8 September 2026, Sheffield, UK
• https://rsecon26.society-rse.org/ UK RSE Conference (the 10th anniversary) in Sheffield, UK 9-11 September 2026
• https://nordic-rse.org/nrse2026/ 9 June 2026, Tromsoe, Norway
• https://events.hifis.net/event/3249/overview deRSE Collaborations workshop in Goettingen, Germany 23-25 September
• https://us-rse.org/usrse26/ US RSE Conference, 19-21 October 2026, San Jose, CA, USA

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

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