🚀 go-pugleaf

sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk (Simon Slavin) expostulated:

......
>He probably means X-rays, which a large number of 1970s photocopiers
>produced while scanning.  X-rays can, indeed, remagnetise some parts
>of a floppy disk.  How do I know ?  I did a physics degree, wondered
>about it, and tried it with a 5.25 inch disk.  After two or three
>copies I was getting general read failures.  So not only could
>photocopying a floppy not produce the copy required, it might also
>make the original unreadable.  Not a good backup method.

How did you determine that it was X-rays that corrupted them, and not static
or a magnetic field from some of the moving parts, or indeed just the heat
from the lamp?  
The notion that 1970s photocopiers were giving off X-rays energetic enough to
blitz a diskette sounds very suspect to me.  If this is true I can see Xerox
being up for a major class action from 1970s office workers blaming everything
from brain cancer to ingrowing toenails on the radiation from photocopiers. 

--R.