Dumpling in a Hanky

I had a summer student come to me this week and ask me to fix back on the installation instructions for a CD that the sellotape holding them on had yellowed and fallen off from…a hint perhaps of its age! Although a 10 year old book isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things… The CD itself was long gone, but the installation instructions remained. They were for: M.S. Word for Windows 2.0 Wordperfect 5.1 for MS-DOS Wordperfect 6.1 for Windows Unsurprisingly, I made an executive decision not to keep those instructions, but I thought about them when reading this story from the BBC. How many people still have information stored on floppy discs (the ‘hard’ floppy discs, not the floppy-floppies, as I remember from my far-distant youth…) but don’t have a machine that can now read them? It’s one of the only good points about my creaky, 7 year old home pc, that I can actually put these things into it and access the information. One of the things on my eternal to-do lis...