[W]hen the library [Cambridge University Library] received 113 boxes of papers and mementoes from the office of physicist Stephen Hawking, it found itself with an unusual challenge. Tucked alongside the letters, photographs and thousands of pages relating to Hawking’s work on theoretical physics, were items now not commonly seen in modern offices – floppy disks.
They were the result of Hawking’s early adoption of the personal computer, which he was able to use despite having a form of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, thanks to modifications and software. Locked inside these disks could be all kinds of forgotten information or previously unknown insights into the scientists’ life. The archivists’ minds boggled.
[…]
To address this challenge, the Future Nostalgia project is trying to piece together bits of ancient computer hardware to read rare and unusual floppy disks. Even when they have the hardware, the team must laboriously determine how disks were formatted so they can read them correctly. Talboom has also found herself delicately teasing mould off the flimsy surface of the magnetic disks to avoid scratching them.
I have bought a Greaseweazle 4.1 card to progressively save my old PC, MSX and ATARI ST floppies. I use a standard PC floppy driver and software like HxCFloppyEmulator and Fluxengine.
A problem reading ATARI and MSX files is that the creation date of the files is lost in the copy.
Why is the creation date lost? As I understand it from Atari Floppy Format the Atari ST floppy format used the same timestamp field for creation time and modification time, and preserving the modification time should be simple to do, shouldn’t it?
I should try again and restart the work, it was one year ago. According to my notes, it was with HxCFloppyEmulator. Maybe the date is visible in the software, I don’t remember, but it is not “translated” when the files are written in my Linux filesystem. Not only from ATARI in fact.
That would make sense. I believe Linux’s utimensat system call doesn’t support updating st_birthtime even on file systems which have st_birthtime.