Aww yeah.
I also remember business reply mail cards from computer magazines. I would request demo software, notch the disks and then overwrite them. Disks were expensive back then, out of my middle school budget… but after I figured out this trick I has so many I would sell them to my friends.
Ouch! That’s bad!
I had a self-imposed disaster in college. I had spent a good amount of time working on a project and had multiple files with the same name but different extensions. When I finished the project, I wanted to move it to my floppy for safe keeping (the campus machines had temporary storage space while working, but very little permanent storage). I also wanted to change the name of the project. Since I was tired and didn’t want to move the files one at a time, I made 2 crucial errors in one statement…
mv proj.* newname.*
So now I’m left with one renamed file and no source files. Lesson learned. Never try something you think will work on important files and always copy/delete, not move. That was a LONG night.
How is it I never thought to do that?!? It’s genius. 
We made up a company name: “Sweet n’ Low of New London”.
I received junk mail to that company name for probably 15 years 
I just tried to open a etsy shop, they didn’t like my store name :“Etsy Bitsy Spider”
That’s fantastic! LOL
I recall that SUPPOSEDLY the back side of single sided disks was “rough” and bad for your drive head. Conspiracy.
My apple IIc took them like a champ.
Incidentally still the best keyboard I’ve ever had.
Luggable! like hauling around a sewing machine.
I’ve got one of those. Even rarer still… it’s one that wasn’t sent in for the recall. The Apple /// was interesting. It would heat up and the motherboard would flex eventually unseating the chips. Apple’s official “fix” for that was, when you called, “pick it up about 6-8 inches off the desk and drop it. It should reseat the chips.” Eventually they recalled all of the machines (which didn’t sell very well at all) and fixed the issue.
How quaint. I have 57TB (had to edit. forgot I added a couple more usb drives) online (two NAS and drives in my main computer) currently and have stacks of hard drives sitting on a shelf with archived… stuff totaling 90TB. And since HDDs tend to go bad just when you need to pull something from them… I also have those copied to LTO5 tapes. I am a digital packrat. I still have uh… questionable copies of windows 3.11 and Windows 95 (back when it was still called Windows Chicago in beta) that’s migrated from floppy to zip to cd to dvd to hdd. I still have boxes of C64 and Amiga software as well. 
My first taste of a computer was a Digital Equipment PDP-8S. I’m reaching back in to foggy memories, but I’d guesstimate that was around 1974. I was still in high school. A friend of my father’s down the street worked on the development team at DEC and had taken the first production build home for debug and extended testing. ASR33 Teletype with a paper tape reader/punch. You programmed it by hand assembling your program and then punching a paper tape with the instructions. Then you toggled in the “RIM” loader by hand on the front panel of the computer, kicked it off, and it’d read in the paper tape and then execute the program.
To quote from Spock on Star Trek, compared to current technology it was like “stone knives and bear skins”. 
How quaint. I have 57TB
I have worked in the mass storage industry for the last 35 years or so. I might have close to that in old drives I’ve retired and stacked up in my basement. Though most are non-functional or too old to be worth taking a chance on. Even got a few with clear covers, left over from trade shows (people loved to watch the rotary actuator move around). 
Note: Hard Drives and SSDs are designed for a maximum of 5 years operating life. If you leave ‘em on all the time (like I do since this is the best way to prevent failures vs. turning on/off all the time), after 5 years you should replace them even if they’re still working OK. And I’m not just sayin’ that to sell more drives.
Cool idea. I’m a little confused about what I’m looking at in the picture. But I think the idea itself is cool.
that’s a 3.5HD platter, coated with Laser marking spray, in the shape of the star trek communicator Moiré pattern
Ah. It was the white laser marking spray that confused me. I saw the pattern, but wasn’t recognizing the platter as a platter because of all the white stuff.
So what did the final result look like?
Magnetic media actually has a “carbon overcoat”. It’s applied by “Carbon Vapor Deposition” and it results in a surface that’s hard, a kind of “amorphous” diamond. It’s not very thick, but I would bet it doesn’t burn off very well (about as well as diamond would). And the magnetic coating is mostly Iron Oxide, so it’s already “burned”. Beneath that is usually a Nickel layer and then the Aluminum substrate (disk platter) and the laser isn’t going to do anything to them at all…
I guess another concern would be reflections. Disk platters are very flat. Much flatter than the mirror in your bathroom by orders of magnitude. They’re also much smoother than anything else you have likely ever been in contact with. The recording head in a HDD flies at a height of maybe 1/2 a micrometer. It’d smash in to any perturbation in the surface. It’s close to an optical-quality mirror (like the ones in our GFs). A laser beam hitting that kind of surface is going to bounce off with little diminishment of the beam strength. The beam isn’t going to scatter much at all. So while I still think this is a cool idea, now I’ve actually thought about it I’m not so sure I’d recommend it.
LOL “fail whale”
… maybe? Would have to check reflectivity in the CO2 laser wavelengths. I think it’s 10,600 nm?
Question is which layer(s) of material to check. Hmm. Maybe best to avoid.
I wondered about “fail whale”. I just wrote it off as something the kids are saying these days.
