🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <35782e3e.2088195736@news.demon.co.uk>,
Harry Broomhall <haeb@demon.net> wrote:
>     Normal airport X-ray machines won't harm them.  If you want to be
> absolutely sure I have always found that handing such material in an
> open box to the search officers was always OK.

Sometime back in the 80s, Byte Magazine did an objective test. They
took about 100 800K floppies and 100 360K floppies, wrote a test
pattern on them, and subjected them to standard checked and unchecked
baggage X-ray machines.

They found that the failure rate (where "failure" is at least 1 wrong
bit on the entire disk) among the zapped disks was substantially
higher, both for the standard X-ray and the unchecked bags X-ray. I
don't remember the exact number, but I think it was around 7%,
compared to around 1% for the control group.

However, since the disks were simply carried or checked by Byte
staffers on routine flights, they couldn't rule out environmental or
magnetic contamination due to something other than X-rays.

Rick R.