SpeednutDave
It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time...
I was at the astoundingly massive San Jose MLK library last weekend doing some research and looking at the various thesis publications on the shelves. It was interesting looking at SJSU master's thesis books that were printed 50 years ago. This was back when San Jose was known agriculturally as "The valley of the heart's delight" long before it became "Silicon Valley".
Once I found the CompSci and EE sections, I started scanning book titles. I did not recognize the word used in this book's title, so I pulled it out to investigate. I was quite surprised to find that 7/8ths of the pages were chopped out to make room for a square pocket on the back cover. Oh dear, that's not what I think that is, is it?!?! Reading the introduction on the book's few pages revealed the author simply stating "Please insert this disk into your computer and you can read all of the project research via hypertext linked documents." +10 points on using an open non-proprietary documentation standard, however epic fail due to data rot.
So, a show of hands, how many of you remember these cursed zip disks. I'd be especially curious to know if anyone still has functional hardware (used in the past year or two) that could actually read this media?
It's sad that I was able to read with ease thesis books 50 years old, but a thesis that's just over 10 years old is completely unreadable… [shrug and shake head]
It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time...
I was at the astoundingly massive San Jose MLK library last weekend doing some research and looking at the various thesis publications on the shelves. It was interesting looking at SJSU master's thesis books that were printed 50 years ago. This was back when San Jose was known agriculturally as "The valley of the heart's delight" long before it became "Silicon Valley".
Once I found the CompSci and EE sections, I started scanning book titles. I did not recognize the word used in this book's title, so I pulled it out to investigate. I was quite surprised to find that 7/8ths of the pages were chopped out to make room for a square pocket on the back cover. Oh dear, that's not what I think that is, is it?!?! Reading the introduction on the book's few pages revealed the author simply stating "Please insert this disk into your computer and you can read all of the project research via hypertext linked documents." +10 points on using an open non-proprietary documentation standard, however epic fail due to data rot.
So, a show of hands, how many of you remember these cursed zip disks. I'd be especially curious to know if anyone still has functional hardware (used in the past year or two) that could actually read this media?
It's sad that I was able to read with ease thesis books 50 years old, but a thesis that's just over 10 years old is completely unreadable… [shrug and shake head]