This spring, the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) knew where
to turn to get legacy hardware.

Pictured above is Griffen, a GVRD employee, showing off an oldschool
5.25 inch floppy disk, and Ryan, a Free Geek volunteer, holding the disk
drive Free Geek provided. Floppy disks hold between 180-1200 KB of data.

The GVRD has hundreds of archived floppy disks dating back to the 1960s,
containing data such as annual precipitation levels. Due to recent
concerns of flooding from the Fraser River, this data has developed new
importance. They wanted to retrieve this information and transfer it to
a different format. Unfortunately, just like most folks these days, they
lacked a computer with a 5.25 inch floppy drive.

While Free Geek does computer recycling, our top priority is computer
reuse. We had the necessary floppy drive on hand, and were tickled to be
able to help out.