🚀 go-pugleaf

lan...@hanami.Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman x61391) writes:

>In article <18...@odin.SGI.COM> ci...@bananaPC.sgi.com (Dave Ciemiewicz) writes:
>>he noticed that the customer had used magnets to
>>hold the colorful disks to the side of the their metal filing cabinet.

>I've heard this story in many variations, but I don't fully believe it anymore.
>Here's why:

 . . . [[ descriptions of experiments removed ]] . . .

>MORAL: It takes a lot more than a medium-size magnet to trash most of today's
>floppy disks.  (On the other hand, don't press your luck, and don't blame it
>on me if you do and it doesn't work out.)

Two problems.  First, I can (almost) verify at least one occurance of the
story.  I was told it in first person by a Northern Telecom representative
(name might have been Hal Hansen, but I'm not sure) who claimed it happened
with one of his clients.  Note, however, some major differences between what
was reported and what you tried:

It was an 8 inch disk.  Like 5 1/4s (and unlike the 3 1/2 you used) they
have thin flexible covers, allowing the magnet to get *much* closer to the
media.  With the inverse square law, that counts for a lot.  The disk was
used only to boot the system -- the other 23 hours 55 minutes of the day
it was under the magnet.  It tooks several weeks of this mistreatment
before the disk would die.  So try your cow magnet with a 5 1/4 for two
weeks and let us know what happens.

Yours for science,

Steve
--

Steve Simmons         Just another midwestern boy
s...@vax3.iti.org  -- or -- ...!sharkey!itivax!scs
"Think of c++ as an object-oriented assembler..."