Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!hc!lanl!unm-la!unmvax!nmtsun!caasnsr
From: caasnsr@nmtsun.nmt.edu (Clifford Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: X-Ray detectors and Tapes
Summary: Floppies Destroyed.
Keywords: storage media damage x-ray
Message-ID: <758@nmtsun.nmt.edu>
Date: 16 Jul 88 20:07:20 GMT
References: <588@bnlux0.bnl.gov> <1925@cuuxb.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: caasnsr@nmtsun.nmt.edu (Clifford Adams)
Distribution: na
Organization: New Mexico Tech, Socorro NM
Lines: 24

In article <1925@cuuxb.ATT.COM> dlm@cuuxb.UUCP (Dennis L. Mumaugh) writes:
>In a time long ago ...  NBS did a  study  and  a  report  on  the
>effects  of  magnetic  fields on tapes.  A short summary ...
 [summary on X-rays and Mag tapes deleted --caa]
>... It [also] didn't address floppy disks.

From experience...

	I was in California, and copied some floppy disks for my
Commodore 64 computer.  On a flight to Colorado Springs, the disks
were run through the X-ray machine used for carry-on luggage.  Most of
the information survived.  Less than 1 bit per 256 bytes was changed.
Unfortunately, this destroyed almost all programs on the five disks.

	The disks for the Commodore 64 store 174K of information per
side (348K/disk).  Think of the damage to high-density formats that
may store a megabyte or more per floppy disk.

>=Dennis L. Mumaugh
> Lisle, IL       ...!{att,lll-crg}!cuuxb!dlm  OR cuuxb!dlm@arpa.att.com
-- 
 Clifford A. Adams  ---  "I understand only inasmuch as I become."
 ForthLisp Project Programmer   (Goal: LISP interpreter in Forth)
 caasnsr@nmtsun.nmt.edu     ...cmcl2!lanl!unm-la!unmvax!nmtsun!caasnsr