Micro Floppy Archive

The archive – a place where data of the past is being stored. Archives, as we know them only existed from the 18th century. Basically it’s only data which is not being used any more, so that our descendants can always have a look in the past. Our message into the future. Having more options to store big loads of data on storage that’s always shrinking, makes it easy to store a whole private life. Doing this, we’re saving our daily made pictures, music and movies in moving them onto a external hard drive. But what will be left in 30 years? Will we have time and be willingly looking through those data? Will we still be able to open those files? Or will the technology be so different that there will be now more JPG, TXT and MP4 format, so that we can’t use them anymore? Is that a reason to trust and use streaming- and cloud based services more and more to avoid archiving?

We’ve taken a look into the past by buying and reading and analyzing lots of floppy disks, to find out about the future. What happened to the archives which have been created – deliberately or unwittingly? Are they still useful? An archive of the past — a look into the future.

The book was conceived and designed by David Broenner & Lucas Hesse as a student project at HS Mainz, using Lausanne (old version) by Nizar Kazan and IBM Plex Mono by Bold Monday. Hesse comments:

Since the content is largely based on datasets and tables, we used IBM Plex Mono to imitate the typical database style with monospaced type. Lausanne harmonises very well with Plex and adds some zest in the larger headlines.