Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Few nostalgic artifacts capture the spirit of the early personal computing era as clearly as the humble floppy disk. Introduced in the early 1970s, these chunky rectangles became the default way to store and transfer digital information for more than two decades before CDs and USB drives rendered them obsolete. Over that period, tens of billions were likely produced. Today, most of those floppies are left to slowly decay in distant landfills, moldy garages, or long-forgotten storage boxes. Abandoning those floppies entirely risks relegating decades worth of scientific research, government records, software, and personal correspondence to the dustbin of history. But recovering all that data stored on the floppies is far more complicated than simply plugging in an old drive. Floppy disks came in various sizes and dozens of incompatible formats. And as the hardware capable of reading them fails and disappears, some warn that vast amounts of early digital history could slip into a “Digital Dark Age.” Leontien …