Knowles points out that when archivists handle really old software, using today’s tools can sometimes change how the original stuff looks or feels just a bit. “We try to minimise how much we change things,” he says.
At the moment, Talboom thinks the most urgent task is just pulling data off those floppy disks and backing it up before it’s lost forever. “Many floppy disks are 40 or 50 years old,” she says. “The magnetic material they’re written on is starting to degrade. So we have to save them as quickly as possible.”
Besides doing this technical work for archivists, Talboom is also getting regular folks involved in her mission to recover forgotten info stuck on floppy disks. On 9 October 2025, she ran a workshop at Cambridge University Library where people could bring in their old disks from home and find out what’s hidden inside.
Knowles thinks it makes total sense for everyday people to help with saving floppy disks. “There’s clearly a very large interest in family history,” he says. “So this is a way for people to recover things that they thought were lost – to learn from what members of their family stored away.”
Rees hopes they might also discover more work by scientists from Cambridge and elsewhere. “Old emails and work calendars might not seem like historical documents,” he says. “They may even seem banal. But that’s how Newton or Darwin’s letters would have seemed 200 years ago. Now they’re fascinating resources that give us a window into the past.”
