From Andrew Davie
In the article on the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes, Stuart Clark states that Viktor Toth wrote a program to extract 40 gigabytes of data from the Pioneer space probes from old floppy discs and record it onto DVDs (3 June, p 46). Forty gigabytes of data from floppies? At 1.44 megabytes per floppy, that would seem to be a staggering 28,000-plus discs.
However, according to Toth the discs in question were actually magneto-optical, with 120-megabyte capacity, also known as “flopticals”. So there were just a few hundred of them – a much more manageable task. Toth’s main contribution has been to write reams of code to extract data from the files and do some real analysis.
Fern Tree, Tasmania, Australia
