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

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

June 09, 2026 • Peter Schmidt • Season 11 • Episode 19

0:00 | 49:23

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/A PDF 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