HISTORY BEFORE IT VANISHES: The archivist preserving decaying floppy disks: It’s a race against time (and magnetic decay) to preserve decades of cultural history stored on obsolete hardware.

I remember interviewing Neal Stephenson about 20 years ago. For the Baroque Cycle he had read papers written by Isaac Newton — the actual papers, in Newton’s own handwriting, on paper — and remarked that meanwhile he had floppy disks at home that no machine you could buy could read anymore.

Even in the 1980s, my old law firm had a room full of obsolete word processors (I remember a huge device from the short-lived Exxon Office Systems, among many others) for use in discovery or FOIA requests.