Two hundred fifty-six thousand two hundred fifty-six

Last week I wrote that I typed nothing that day, which was true and was not the whole day. On the last afternoon in Kyiv somebody put my grandmother's disk on a reading machine, and I stood beside it with my hands behind my back like a child in a shop, which is roughly what I was.

That kind of machine does not do what people assume. It does not read files. It reads the magnetic flux off the surface, the raw changes and their timing and nothing else, and what it writes down describes a physical object rather than any contents. Flux is not sectors. Sectors are not files. Files are not text. Every one of those steps needs to know what format is underneath, and for a Soviet eight-inch disk labeled 1989 nobody knows that, including the people I asked, and they were the right people to ask.

It did not go cleanly. Thirty-seven years in apartments rather than in an archive will do that. We ran it again, and again after that. Some tracks only came on the fourth pass. By the reader's own count two sectors never came at all, and at some point we stopped waiting for them. That is the whole of the drama. Two.

So, the title. If the format is the ordinary one for that size and that decade, seventy-seven tracks, twenty-six sectors to a track, one hundred twenty-eight bytes to a sector, then the square holds 256,256 bytes. I did that multiplication with a pen on the bus, then did it again, because the first time I had written the same digits twice and assumed I had slipped. It is not a measurement. It is a hypothesis about an object I have owned for most of my life and still cannot open.

Reading is not running, and having is not reading. I came home with a recording of a magnetic surface and nothing more, and there is no program anywhere that turns it into one readable line. What I gained is the thing that actually mattered: the surface is copied now, and it can go on failing quietly on my shelf without taking anything with it.

Two hundred fifty-six thousand two hundred fifty-six. Probably. That is where I am, and I will be there a while.