It’s been nine years (wow!) since I last contributed something to my Object Collection project, so this is a fun one. I was scanning photos and documents for my 20 year college reunion (which I flew back to Calgary for in October) and among my keepsakes was a 3.5″ floppy disk I used for school projects. I thought it would be fun to remind my classmates about our reliance upon the humble floppy disk in 1998 – and boy did we ever rely on it! I remember more than one student who kept using the same disk from the year before, and when it died and they lost their work they were shocked (I preached the gospel of backups even back then, but no one thinks it will ever happen to them…).
I scanned a 6 megapixel version of the disk, but it had writing on the label. I spent a couple of minutes in Photoshop CC trying to remove the writing but quickly realized it would take me at least 20 minutes of work to get it cleaned up, and I wasn’t confident I could do that good of a job. Here’s what the original looked like – it also had a nasty shadow up top I knew would be a pain to fix.
