One day we'll eventually run out of ancient drives that can read their floppies, but the media could be still readable using other means. I would love to see a plain scanner like device that reads magnetic fields instead of light reflections, that is, something that slowly scans the entire surface of the media [1] just like a scanner then builds a pattern of tracks and sectors keeping track (pun unintended) of its position, then proceeds to map them into data thanks to a database describing how data structure is arranged by different brands/disk formats/filesystems/etc.
We wouldn't need either speed or realtime reading; being able to read and decypher an ancient disk in 3 days of multiple passes to correct errors, would still make it a success. A (very) small rotating head would likely work here. Did anyone ever attempt to do something similar?
[1] The magnetic media should be removed from the disk body, that is, the disk would stand still in the "scanner" while the head(s) would slowly do multiple passes to map the remnants of its magnetic data.
This would eliminate the requirement for custom readers for very rare floppies, say like those 2" ones I can't even remember where I saw them (possibly a musical instrument from the 80s).
The technology to manufacture magnetic heads is not lost --- building a lathe-like drive on which any disk could be mounted and read doesn't seem like an impossible task. In fact, given that modern magnetic heads of the type used in hard drives can detect far smaller flux transitions, they could be used to "oversample" the original tracks for better accuracy.
What would the advantage of making the scanner completely unlike the actual physical layout of the encoded data be? It just seems to make the thing more difficult for no obvious gain.
I agree things would be initially difficult, but I don't see how we could make a reader for less known disks without replicating their original drive mechanics as well, which is probably the hardest part. To me it would be more "scalable" to sample the magnetic field relative to the head position on a plane (on which we fixed the disk), then building a structure where each 2D element is mapped onto its position on the disk and assigned the value of the magnetic field. The result wouldn't be that different from this project pictures, but we could swap a 5.25 disk with a 3.5 one without changing a single screw in the reader. A further development could be reading more disks at once, provided their surface can be reached by the head.
It would surely be useless while we have working disk drives, probably not 20 years from now...
It sounds to me like this is 'easier' because, I dunno, traversing arrays is 'easier'. But mechanically, serially scanning a disk or cylinder is much simpler than serially scanning a rectangle. You can build a high resolution scanner that isn't based directly on the original drive mechanism that but still does magical high resolution scanning for offline analysis without the additional artificial obstacle of making it like an image scanner.
Lovely visualization of knowledge that is only usually obtained through low-level spleunking.
I'd love to see visualizations of some of the encryption approaches used on the Apple ][, where sector alignment was shifted, file table indexeas moved, data interleaving, etc. This was all possible due to the soft-sectored disks and timings determined in software (Woz's genius move to reduce chip count!)
I could never wrap my mind around what was happening to the data.
Somebody make something like this for DOS floppies please. It'd be great to see visualizations of normally formatted 1440KiB floppies vs. 1680KiB DMF ones.
C64 disks with custom loaders (read: games disks) were so fascinating to me as a kid because the sounds of the 1541 drive would change as soon as that fastloader code activated. Lots of game disks had their own unique loading sound signature.
I would love to see a comparison of 80s floppy disk drives. Lots of genius designs within... except the 1541's terrible bug which was never fixed due to backwards compatibility.
Cool stuff.