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One of the nice things about magnetic storage is that as long as the magnetic layer remains intact, the data it contains should stay readable pretty much indefinitely. That raises the prospect of recovering data from really old computer systems featuring magnetic memory, such as the 63-year old LGP-21 that [David Lovett] of Usagi Electric is currently restoring. Its magnetic memory disk is nothing amazing by modern standards, but after initial testing it seems to spin up and read data just fine, raising the question of what was left on the drive when it was last used, meaning what was in memory at the time.

The read/write head side of the LGP-21’s magnetic memory.…