While I was at college, I wanted to write a program with a large user base. And which will make me famous in a small way. Like how Arno Schäfer is known after FIPS, how Eugene Roshal is known after WinRar & how Andrew Tridgell is known after Samba. And not like how Linus is known after Linux. I won't say that that dream was realized. But looking back, I am satisfied with my efforts.
There were a lot of candidates for that
masterpiece program. I had high expectations on Partition
Rescue and Undeletion
Wizard. But the one which grew beyond my expectations is a little program
for recovering files from damaged floppy disks. Ironically, it was named FlopShow.
I still remember the two consecutive all-nighters during which most of the
recovery/undelete routines were written. And it was on one of those days that RMS
visited out college. It was first written for dos using bios disk interrupts to
do the low level disk access. To make the program usable and to give it a nice
user interface it was later ported to windows.
FlopShow saw light when it was included in the software distribution CD of the magazine Chip in December 2002. I then uploaded it to a lot of freeware download sites over the internet. And when I decided to have a website to showcase all my programs, FlopShow became the most downloaded program.
There is something magical about data recovery programs. And particularly when they are free. Your users will thank you every time they use it. They have written to me whenever I was able to successfully retrieve their files. And its a very nice feeling to see that mail from a strange person from some corner of the world when I check my email one fine morning. It's confidence. It's power. It's satisfaction. It's a lot of things which have always helped me to think forward.
FlopShow has helped journalists
| Hi, Thank you for producing this software, my mother is a journalist and wrote 2 stories and 'saved' them to a 1.44mb disk. It seems the files got corrupt during saving as when we attempted to open them in WORD again the drive only whirred. Using your software enabled us to recover the .DOC files successfully. Excellent . Thanks you deserve reward. Sandy Sher . S.Africa |
and writers
| I just used Flopshow to recover a file from an apparently defective disk. I had a couple of hours worth of creative writing on it, and I'm thrilled to have recovered all the new stuff. (There is still some garbaged text in one section, but I have all of that saved in an older file on my hard drive.) Thanks!!! Ron |
and students
| Hello, I recently found your program "FlopShow" from a Google search. It helped me recover lots of documents from a bad floppy that were very important. Thank you for making this useful software available for free. (I am a highschool student with no job, so I can't afford expensive recovery software.) I really appreciate it. The program was excellent as well. It's interface was simple, straightforward and easy to use. The recovery itself was fast and effective. We need more good programmers like yourself :) . Thanks again, Brandon Wardlaw |
and parents
| I used FlopShow to recover a homework file for my daughter. Thank You!! Earl Armstrong |
and sometimes it reminded users of their favorite oldies
| Dear S Sreejith, Thank you for the excellent little utility Flopshow - reminds me of the old Norton Commander only better. kind regards Bill Klaus Ballarat Australia |
It helped me get offers for beer at a couple of cities around the world, like this one below.
| I come from berlin. if you ever should be in berlin, feel free to contact me before and i will invite you for a beer or coffee :-) All the best 2 you & Best regards, Holger |
Yes, they kept on writing like this.
| Hi there, Thanks so much for making the floppy disk recovery program : FlopShow 1.2 I used it to successfully recover an important document from a corrupted floppy disk. Your hard work, saved my day, Thank-you, David Thomas. |
There are a lot more like this. And these mails are all I have in return for the efforts which I put in for programming FlopShow. So keep them coming :)
| "Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward? First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God's delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake. Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child's first clay pencil holder for Daddy's office." - The Mythical Man Month |
Its been more than 3 years, that FlopShow has been out in the wild. As long as the PC ships with floppy disk drives, FlopShow will be there to take care of damaged disks.
- -
Sreejith S, 28th April, 2005
But the best, is yet to come :)