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

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 Get in touch Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/