The Indestructible Floppy Disk Experiment

by Alma Peterson

Carrying the 64 library disks back and forth to every meeting can be a real test of courage sometimes.
Especially when it is in the 90 degree range outside, and I'm carting somewhere between 1,000 to
1,500 disks in the trunk of my non-air conditioned car. Of course, we keep an entire back-up library
just in case a disaster does strike someday, but would you want to have to re-copy each and every 64
disk in the club library? Ugh! Have you ever wondered just how much abuse a disk could take?
Curiosity finally got the best of me last week and I decided to find out. The experiment started out
rather small, simple and to the point, but then I got a little carried away.    

Using our own DCMR library catalog on side one and a full disk of library data on side two, I quickly
made up two "experimental" copies of the disk, marking one "SUN" and the other "FREEZE." That's
when the abusive side of me took over.  

Happily cackling to myself, (cackling happily?) I cranked out another called "STOMP," then one called
"KOOL AID," and finally one called "MICRO WAVE."  

My first victim was the "SUN" disk. I threw it out the back door into full-blazing sunlight for two hours.
In the meantime, "FREEZE" got popped into my handy kitchen freezer and promptly forgotten. 
     
Fun! But when I brought the "SUN" disk in a full two hours later, both sides still worked perfectly.
Hmmmm! Not at all what I expected. Did I do something wrong? Maybe the black vinyl jacket was
enough of a shield to keep the sun's rays from doing any damage.      

The next day I took the jacket apart with the flat edge of a little screwdriver. It's real easy, you just
slide it under the edge of the little seam on back of the disk and then rip! and tear! and slash! til it
comes apart. Scratch one black vinyl jacket. The temperature was between 85-90, so I put the actual
floppy, you know, the part you're never supposed to touch, right out there in the sun with absolutely no
protection for another couple of hours, brought it back in, and faced another dilemma: no floppy will
work in these drives without a jacket! Okay, but I'm dying to see what these "scrambled up" files must
look like.     

So I carefully sliced off a thin section of one side of a good jacket, removed the blank floppy and put
"SUN" inside. Even with one side of the jacket cut open, the disk slid right into the drive like it should,
and both sides of "SUN" still worked perfectly.   

Well, maybe it hadn't received quite the right amount of heat like disks closed up in a hot car would get.
At this point I was getting rather frustrated at the durability of this floppy. I scratched out the word
"SUN" on the label and re-named it "CLOTHES DRYER." Then I heated up the dryer real good and
put the entire disk in, all alone, still in the sliced jacket. I figured half an hour ought to do it. It came out
sort of deformed looking, and the label was half off so I just flattened it out with a rolling pin while it
was still warm. I guess I should have flattened it out with a hot iron instead, because when I tried once
again to load the disk it still worked just fine.      

It's pretty hard to continue, with any sort of enthusiasm, in an experiment that's not producing expected
results. I thawed out "FREEZE" overnight and the next day it worked perfectly. Both sides.     

I set the "SUN" disk up on the dashboard of my car all day long. After about an hour, that disk had
curled up into the shape of a cereal bowl. When I finally brought it back in the house it was barely
recognizable. The vinyl jacket, after its initial curl up earlier, had actually swollen and bubbled up from
the intense heat. With trembling fingertips, I pulled the SUN floppy from its twisted, blistered prison,
placed it in a new jacket, and then into the drive, and guess what? It worked perfectly!  

Both sides of the disk called "MICRO WAVE" were totally zapped in less than 30 seconds, so
consider that rumor proven. But attempts to re-format resulted in a perfectly working disk.

Stay tuned next month for another report on the "SUN" floppy, which, in its shiny new sliced-open
jacket, has been renamed to "boil in saucepan on kitchen stove as long as it takes."

Ed note: Kids, don't try this at home. Alma Peterson is a trained professional.

(Editor's PS: A greatly condensed version of this article was printed in The Interface in September
1990. A year or two ago I attempted to contact Ms. Peterson to request an update on her further
experiments, but I was informed by the man who answered that she is no longer involved with
Commodore. Perhaps all her disks melted.)

(From the Dayton Area Commodore Users Group newsletter via The Commodore Information Center
web site (http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html) )