[HN Gopher] The last person standing in the floppy disk business
___________________________________________________________________
The last person standing in the floppy disk business
Author : fortran77
Score : 513 points
Date : 2022-09-13 13:32 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eyeondesign.aiga.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (eyeondesign.aiga.org)
| asciimov wrote:
| I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of
| disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the
| drive and hearing the motor whirr.
|
| Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag
| full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can
| easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't
| a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents.
| All of them are fiddly. They are obnoxiously easy to loose.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which
| can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would
| have the same feel.
| throwanem wrote:
| They did that back in the day, with the LS-120 and -240
| "SuperDisk" and I think a couple of similar but even less
| well known systems. They used a secondary head tracking servo
| information on the medium in order to achieve tracking
| precision beyond what was available with the standard floppy
| design, and thus (no doubt along with reformulated media)
| write more information in the same area. They were back-
| compatible with regular 3.5" floppies, but they were also
| slow, flaky, expensive, and introduced after Zip disks but
| not long enough before writable CD media, and so they failed
| to compete.
|
| If I were to do it today, I'd probably think in terms of USB,
| with an annular PCB loaded with flash chips in place of the
| disk medium, and a set of pads exposed by the slider to mate
| with pogo pins on the drive's head sled. (The PCB would be
| fixed in the disk case, with the central "cookie" remaining
| in place to mate with the drive spindle.) You'd almost
| certainly need to modify or replace the drive firmware, which
| in its default state would likely find this all _very_
| confusing, so it could spin the "disk" but avoid moving the
| heads (and thus interrupting connections and maybe also doing
| mechanical damage) and thus give the added realism of motor
| noises that stock USB drives just can't match. For extra
| bonus points (and a saleable product!) replace the firmware
| (and the onboard controller hardware) with something that can
| talk USB to the inserted "disk", and the native protocol out
| the board-edge connector to the computer in which the drive
| is installed - and then you have one of those "multidisk"
| devices for vintage machines, but one that actually uses a
| _disk_ , and you can make a mint from retro nerds like me who
| enjoy old machines but are too busy to deal with them in
| their fully stock configuration. [1]
|
| I'm the wrong kind of engineer for a project like this, but I
| wish I weren't, because it sounds like a lot of fun.
|
| [1] Well, not me personally, because the only machine I still
| have with a 3.5" drive is a Toshiba Tecra from 1995 or so
| that uses all the exuberantly nonstandard interfaces one
| would expect of such a year. The internal floppy gave up the
| ghost ages ago, but an external one and an Ethernet PC card
| keep it able to talk to the world when it wants to. Heaven
| forfend its hard drive ever fail, though...
|
| _edits:_ correcting misrecalled SuperDisk technical details
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| LS-120 could also superformat a standard HD floppy to 30MB
| with the caveat that you had to write the whole disk in one
| pass.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Hi-MD (introduced 2004, ~1 GB capacity when average HD's were
| running 200-300 GB) was never produced in a data version that
| I can tell, but even the original stored about 140 MB (in
| 1992, that was a lot of data in the size of a floppy and a
| far sturdier package). It wasn't a ton of space, but you
| didn't have to worry about static, or malicious devices
| masquerading as HID, and it was certainly good enough that if
| magneto-optical drives had been continuously developed, we'd
| be looking at pretty reasonable capacities today.
|
| Yes, much lower capacity per dollar than silicon, but if it
| were very sturdy (it was) and offered near-infinite
| rewriteability (it did), it could have had a market.
| asciimov wrote:
| Loads of companies tried back in the late 90's and through
| the very early 2000's. Zip disks, Jaz, Clik! All had the same
| problem, the drives needed to read them weren't found on
| every computer. The winners ended up being writable optical
| media and USB thumbdrives.
|
| Personally, I wish someone would produce a consumer grade
| tape system, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah even at the time there were magneto-optical disks[0],
| which I think got as high as around 9.1gb. I had a bunch
| ranging from 120-480mb, which was huge at the time. They are
| a bit thicker than a regular floppy, but nearly the same form
| factor. Awesome at the time for backups and of course very
| useful for print/publishing businesses that had to courier
| over huge 300dpi documents to print, stuff like that.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
| laumars wrote:
| My memory of floppy disks was having to write multiple copies
| of the same files across different disks because odds are one
| of them would fail. It was particularly painful if you had to
| zip any files up as odds are you'd end up with a failed CRC.
|
| I was a relatively early adopter of CD writers because I was
| sick of floppy disks failing.
|
| I've also got a stack of 3" floppies (like what was used for
| the Amstrad CPC and Nintendo Famicom) that don't work too.
| asciimov wrote:
| A few years back I was doing some cleanup of old media.
| Checking to see what was on stuff and what I could toss. Of
| the hundreds of floppies, I had a file failure rate of about
| 5%. However, my CD/DVD failure rate was around 22% including
| factory stamped discs.
|
| Now, true, a lot of the dud floppies had been filtered out
| back in the day. But I was shocked at how well they had
| faired over the long term vs optical media.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| I remember buying boxes of floppies hoping that I'd get one
| that would be error free.
| chaoticmass wrote:
| I remember how my blood would run cold when you could hear
| the drive making that distinctive noise when it's re-reading
| the same sector over and over again because it's not reading
| right.
| jszymborski wrote:
| There's always the floppy thumbdrive
|
| https://www.wired.com/2009/06/floppy-disk-as-usb-thumb-drive...
| mikehotel wrote:
| You might be interested in this floppy disk upgrade using sd
| cards.
|
| https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8IZcP0oP0OU
| asciimov wrote:
| That's neat!
| stinos wrote:
| I had exactly the same with Minidisc. Go through discs with
| labels I made myself, select one, 'click' opens the player,
| 'click' insert the disc and close, then the device comes to
| life in your hand and you press a hardware play button (of
| which muslce memory knows the location by heart so always just
| works), music comes out of the headphones, so fullfilling.
| asciimov wrote:
| It was a shame Sony never produced a consumer grade minidisc
| writer for PCs. I always wanted to be as cool as Neo in the
| original Matrix, sharing warez on minidiscs.
| goosedragons wrote:
| They did. It came out too late and was too expensive for
| what you got compared to a Zip drive (an extra 40MB and
| smaller size for like an extra $500). They were also
| weirdly limited in that MD-DATA drives could only play
| regular MDs, not record music onto them.
|
| They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but
| I don't believe those could handle data, just music.
| eek2121 wrote:
| You can put a label on a USB drive. Amazon also has holders to
| sell you. Contemplating doing something like that for my Steam
| collection. Would also like an actual dedicated Windows USB
| stick.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| Agreed. I'd love a modern (ie. pcie card or usb) floppy
| controller so you could have a humble old 5,25" in your
| workstation just for fun...
| mark_round wrote:
| I wrote about this a few years ago on my blog when I re-fitted
| my old Commodore Amiga with a floppy drive after years of using
| SD-card floppy emulators:
| http://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy/
|
| There really was something special about labelling the disks,
| the deliberate act of sorting through your collection and
| selecting one... To me, it feels much like picking out a vinyl
| record to enjoy rather than having everything "on tap" with
| Spotify. And then there's the scene it generated which reminds
| me of the tape trading days of the 80s:
|
| "...Later on, when I eventually got involved in The Scene,
| floppies brought us together in a way I think is now sadly
| long-gone. Because we traded disks with each other - and groups
| typically had members whose sole "job" in the group was as a
| "trader" or "swapper" - we also wrote to each other. As a
| particularly awkward teenager (with a bunch of the usual teen
| issues and a healthy side-order of angst), some of the closest
| friendships I formed during those years were with the other
| members of my group. Alongside the floppy disks we'd write
| long, rambling letters to each other full of everything and
| nothing. We'd fill our envelopes to each other with "Jiffy
| Junk" - little trinkets we'd collect and swap: Kinder surprise
| toys, trading cards and the occasional mix-tape... Even though
| I think I only ever met one of the guys from my group in
| person, I still think about them often to this day and wonder
| what they're all doing now.
|
| As the Amiga scene gradually died and the BBS (and later, the
| Internet and FTP sites) became the primary means of obtaining
| software I think a lot of those friendships were broken. Even
| though The Scene is still a very close-knit community, I'd be
| interested to know whether those same bonds exist today when
| most communication is probably electronic in nature..."
| dotancohen wrote:
| It's great to read that on HN. Every time I look at the HN
| background colour I think of the 1541 disk drive - I'm near
| certain its colour was either a conscious or unconscious
| influence.
| wollsmoth wrote:
| burning dvd/cds was fun. Figuring out how to burn a dvd that
| could run on a dvd player was fun. Now it's all just done via
| chromecast. Convenient and less wasteful, I have to admit.
| Koshkin wrote:
| And the Germans had fun naming their software "Nero Burning
| ROM."
| akolbe wrote:
| I remember that. :) And I remember buying a 1 Gigabyte hard
| disk for PS1,000 ...
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| I never got that, it's amazing. Was a teen when I was using
| it and hadn't learned enough Roman history. Thanks.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| 22 years later I find out there's a joke behind the name.
| Thanks HN.
| ljf wrote:
| I used Nero for years and 'got' the joke about Nero and
| Burning, but totally missed the ROM/Rome/German spelling of
| Rome.
|
| How did I miss that! Thanks for making the joke complete
| for me ;)
| [deleted]
| snvzz wrote:
| I miss the tingle felt in the elbow when inserting a floppy in
| Amiga 500.
|
| Or who am I kidding, I still use my A500 so I can't really say
| I miss it.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Could make one of these
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/2a/c3/942ac3e79c35b0e4d9e3...
| moth-fuzz wrote:
| Not to mention they were integrated into the machine itself -
| picture 1-4 floppy disks fitting snuggly inside your PC right
| where they're supposed to go and where nothing else even could
| go, versus a handful of usb sticks of various shapes and sizes
| sticking out haphazardly like porcupine needles, some even
| pushing each other over because they're too thick, or connected
| by a jungle of wires, either way hooked up to a generic
| universal bus port that could be used for literally anything
| else and has no specific semantic meaning to your PC's
| software.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The "various shapes and sizes" is what offends my
| sensibilities about USB sticks. I kind of wish there was a
| single form factor for USB drives, purely for cosmetic
| reasons. Yes, I know that only the connector has to have a
| standard form, but it's kind of ugly that every time I buy a
| USB stick, I'm subjected to the random wacky design taste of
| a random hardware company.
| mrb wrote:
| << _I once got a request from the Netherlands for half a million
| floppy disks_ >>
|
| I want to know (1) who are they, and (2) why do they need them?
| belfalas wrote:
| "You won't forget your assignment if you tack it onto the fridge
| with a magnet."
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as
| printing money. It was unbelievably profitable.
|
| I remember a little operation run out of Topeka, Kansas in the
| 80's called "Budget Bytes" that sold floppies with Macintosh
| shareware on them. I mean I could have downloaded some of the
| stuff over FTP from the university but you still needed a floppy
| to copy them on to.
|
| So fun, poring over the news-print catalog of disks they had
| available, deciding which ones to order.
|
| I assumed it was a Real Business(tm) at the time but in hindsight
| it was no doubt some entrepreneur copying floppies in his garage.
| I wish I had been as entrepreneurial at the time.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I'm actually reading a book about these shareware businesses.
| It was quite profitable selling them for 4$-7$ and they were
| popular. They would start as one person and occasionaly grow
| into huge operations involving hundreds of employees.
| ok123456 wrote:
| What's the book?
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Shareware Heroes
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61272567-shareware-
| heroe...
| systems_glitch wrote:
| floppydisk.com bought Athana a few years ago, and got the
| remainder of their stock. AFAIK Athana was one of the very last
| manufacturers of several media formats. I don't know if
| floppydisk.com ended up with any of their manufacturing
| capability, or if Athana even had any at the time of sale. Athana
| had stopped manufacturing at least some of their offerings (e.g.
| 5.25" hard sector) over a decade ago.
|
| floppydisk.com didn't get them all though, we bought around
| 28,000 5.25" DSDD diskettes surplus:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/f5jM4mO.jpg
|
| The above pictured lot is where the diskettes for the boxed
| releases of Nox Archaist and Burger Becky's game came from.
| smm11 wrote:
| ZIP drive was the bomb. I don't recall what it was, but there was
| a Gateway or something (maybe) with a built-in ZIP drive. The
| future, man.
| jeramey wrote:
| At least until you heard the click of death, that is!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The first laptop computer I used was a Bondwell 2 (running CP/M)
| which was one of the first to use a 3.5" floppy for storage. But
| I actually preferred the Epson PX-8 which had a micro cassette
| for storage instead of a floppy (too large). I wonder if there's
| still any market for micro-cassettes for digital storage anymore
| just as there is for floppies. (DAT was another tape storage
| format used by some computers such as SGI.)
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Part of the "joy/hell" of using floppies, the waiting to see if
| your data was ok. Example when you have ARJ/ZIP/RAR a 10+ disk
| "floppy collection" (pirate copy) of your favourite game from you
| friends from school.
|
| You get home after school and dammit floppy number 7 has CRC
| error :/ _sigh_
|
| It could take DAYS to copy a game, back then, between you friend
| forgetting for a day or two and having to redo big copies at
| least once :) All with the turnaround time of waiting one-school-
| day
|
| #GoodTimes :)
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| The pirate copy of Dark Forces took ~41 disk. It was rather had
| to make it fit in a 120 MB hard drive...
| davidw wrote:
| Is it just me, or are there are a lot of these stories from
| _that_ generation along the lines of
|
| * I was doing this thing somewhat successfully
|
| * Then someone asked me to jump into this software thing even if
| I had zero experience.
|
| * Then we did X, Y and Z...
|
| It seems rarer these days?
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| One advantage of floppy disks, is that you could safely take a
| random disk, reformat it and reuse it.
|
| Now, however, if you insert a random USB drive into your
| computer, you run a high risk that your computer will be pwned.
| seanc wrote:
| Not true! Floppies had viruses too. Even back in the 80's.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus)
| bbarnett wrote:
| I recall a few on my c64, back in the early 80s for sure.
| koala_man wrote:
| I think parent refers to the fact that if you insert a floppy
| disk and reformat it without running anything on it, it's
| safe.
|
| This is not true for USB drives, as USB controllers can be
| programmed to re-insert a virus or fry the system at any time
| in the future.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Not true for floppies, either. To reformat the boot sector,
| include the /S switch.
|
| FORMAT /S
| outworlder wrote:
| Yeah, but they would not autorun anything. If you forgot
| them inserted and rebooted, however...
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| He did claim "reformat", which tends to delete these viruses.
| Albeit to clarify you'd also need to clear the boot record,
| which is not something all DOS format tools would do.
|
| Compare that to USB devices, which contain data that survives
| to all host-initiated methods of erasure and which may in
| fact not be storage devices at all; i.e. fake keyboard/mouse
| presses et al.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| Michelangelo and similar viruses only activate when you boot
| from the disk it's on. Insert a disk with Michelangelo in a
| running system, then format the disk (make sure you overwrite
| the boot sector), all OK.
|
| The operating systems of the time didn't have any autoplay
| functionality that could be exploited by viruses. I guess in
| theory viruses could have exploited things like buffer
| overflows in the OS code that reads the file allocation table
| or directories, but I've never heard of such a thing, and
| Michelangelo and similar boot viruses certainly were not that
| advanced.
| tgv wrote:
| Autoplay is as at least as old as Windows 3.1. A file
| called "autoexec.bat" would be executed on mounting, IIRC
| (not a Windows-person myself).
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Not at all. Autoplay is new to the win 95 shell. And the
| idea of "mounting" is absolutely alien to a DOS system
| which can't even tell when a disk is inserted or not on a
| device.
|
| DOS' shell would run autoexec.bat when booting but only
| the one from the boot volume.
| anthk wrote:
| That's autorun.inf, not autoexec.bat.
| seanc wrote:
| Back in the 80's few machines had hard drives, and often
| only one floppy. So if you put your disk in the drive and
| fired up the machine then bang, you were infected.
|
| Also, lots of machines with hard drives were configured to
| boot from floppy by default. Few floppies had working boot
| sectors, so most people never noticed. Until they put an
| infected disk into A:, turned on the computer and saw chaos
| ensue.
| mietek wrote:
| There were plenty of Macintosh viruses that spread this
| way, such as the WDEF/MDEF/CDEF families.
|
| _> Infects the Desktop file used by the Finder. ... Spread
| through sharing disks, as every Mac disk includes a Desktop
| file. It is not necessary to run a program to spread this
| virus; simply mounting the disk is enough for it to infect
| the Desktop file of every disk mounted on the Mac._
|
| https://lowendmac.com/2015/classic-mac-os-viruses/
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That was the first thing that came to mind.
|
| Maybe there would be a market for a "data USB port" which would
| filter away all other kinds of USB devices than storage
| devices.
| blantonl wrote:
| You haven't lived until you installed an operating system from 38
| floppy disks.
|
| Slackware and OS/2 for example
|
| My lord those were fun days. Especially fun when you got to OS/2
| Disk 21 and it died, or Slackware Xwindows Floppy 4 and you
| started hearing that disk drive kurchunking and you just knew you
| were dead in the water.
| system2 wrote:
| I remember installing windows 95 from floppy disk. It was only
| 13 disks but with MSDOS it would go up to 16. Some drivers here
| and there, 20+ disk installation would take hours.
| jhbadger wrote:
| In the early 1990s you could get Linux distributions on
| floppy (if you didn't have a CD-ROM drive yet) -- I remember
| one that had over 30 disks.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Windows 10 Floppy Install...
|
| Please Insert Disk 1 of 4166
| grishka wrote:
| You'd probably only need a third of that if you opt to not
| install any of the .net/UWP stuff though.
| romwell wrote:
| > hearing that disk drive kurchunking
|
| That's the best onomatopoeia I've seen in a while, and it
| brings the feeling of _instant dread_
| fortran77 wrote:
| I installed SCO Unix from 96 floppy disks dozens of times.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| SCO Xenix was every bit as bad, and yes, I did the Slackware
| "download floppy images, make a stack of floppies, spend hours
| installing" dance as well. I remember being very relieved by
| the rise of CD-ROM and CD-R.
| rvba wrote:
| Buffer overflows when burning CDs was a big pain too.
|
| I am not sure if those early CD writers even had buffers -
| but they were so expensive back then, that I didnt have one.
|
| There was "that one guy" who had it and was supplying pirated
| stuff for whole neighborhood.
| linker3000 wrote:
| ISTR a couple of boot floppies was enough to get the attached
| Wangtek drive spinning so you could bootstrap a DC600 tape
| and load from there.
|
| I don't recall if this was an official implementation or
| something we cooked up.
|
| Oh yes, and there was the floppy way too.
| blantonl wrote:
| It was a great feeling when we were able to bootstrap a
| CDROM drive.
| lizknope wrote:
| I installed Slackware in the fall of 1994. I only had about 10
| blank floppies so I would go to the computer lab and download
| the "A" base system, then wipe those, go back to the computer
| lab, download and install the "AP" application set, and so on
| for the development tools, X Windows System, and more. It took
| most of the weekend but it was amazing having a Unix system on
| my Pentium 90.
|
| I had a brand new IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM which was not supported yet.
| About 6 months later it was and I started ordering the multi CD
| set from Walnut Creek cdrom.com every 6 months or so to get new
| distributions.
| rconti wrote:
| I was actually able to dual-boot and install from hard disk
| when I installed slackware in .. August 95? But, zmodem on a
| 14.4k modem meant each download took 12-13 minutes, so it was
| an entire weekend of just walking around the house with a
| kitchen timer and kicking off a new 'disk' each time it
| buzzed.
| davidw wrote:
| Bonus points for downloading all those slackware floppies over
| a 14.4 modem.
| Swizec wrote:
| My friend got Settlers 2 on CD for his birthday. My computer
| didn't have a CD drive.
|
| Solution? Copy the installed game from his computer onto 30
| floppy disks. Carefully reconstruct the installation on my
| computer.
|
| It worked.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Slackware yes, OS/2 Warp I had the good fortune to only get on
| CD.
|
| But those Mac System 6 disks...
| linker3000 wrote:
| And by coincidence, an unopened, branded box of 10 x DS/HD 3.5"
| floppy disks arrived in the post for me today.
|
| They will be used with a couple of Z80 systems I have constructed
| - when I build a floppy controller board!
| slowhand09 wrote:
| I prob have 2 boxes, shrink wrapping intact... in my storage
| closet.
| linker3000 wrote:
| I have 2 boxes somewhere that I bought when Staples in the UK
| was closing down; they presumably found them right at the
| back of a shelf in the stores. 50p a box I think.
| linker3000 wrote:
| ...oh and I dumped this lot a while back:
|
| https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-
| AS...
| egypturnash wrote:
| I get nothing but a little eye in the center of the screen,
| blinking. It is cute but does not contain the promised
| information.
|
| Reloading with the adblockers off gets the story. I hate this
| world.
| shantnutiwari wrote:
| I use ublock origin on firefox and I could read the story?
| wrycoder wrote:
| For once, an article more interesting than the HN comments!
| narrator wrote:
| What's funny, economically, about this guy is that his investment
| in floppy disks made roughly a 10x return!
|
| "Another thing is that I don't know what my inventories are
| worth. I know that ten years ago I bought floppy disks for eight
| to 12 cents apiece. If I was buying a container of a million
| disks, I could probably get them for eight cents, but what are
| they worth today? In the last ten years they've gone from ten
| cents to one dollar apiece, and now you can sell a 720KB double
| density disks for two dollars."
|
| Reminds me of when I was at a thrift store and these used
| paperbacks were being sold used for triple the cover price that
| they sold for new in the 1950s.
| zoobab wrote:
| Keep at least one for Tomsrtbt!
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Old samplers/MIDI sequencers without SCSI interfaces do use
| floppy disks so I hoarded a hundred of them just in case (even
| though there is a system now that allows a floppy disk reader to
| be replaced by a USB thumb drive reader). They are getting quite
| expensive in Europe, not paying 5EUR for a single HD disk...
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32663995 - Aug 2022 (130
| comments)
|
| Less recent and related:
|
| _Ask HN: Why is there still a market for floppy disks?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31658880 - June 2022 (12
| comments)
|
| _Tokyo says long goodbye to beloved floppy disks_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064316 - Nov 2021 (12
| comments)
| przefur wrote:
| I've read an article about Japanese policeman that've lost a
| floppy disks with personal data of some Japanese men, it was a
| story from this January.
|
| This data leak, due to obscurity and the volume was more of a
| joke in my country, than a serious news. I do however wonder,
| what it was back in the day? I've never heard of any large
| scale data leaks involving floppy disks, perhaps I'm too young.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Great interview; really enjoyed this.
|
| In the late 80s / early 90s, I had a home computer with 5.25"
| floppies. I remember at the mall around the holidays, Radio Shack
| would run a holiday animation on their Tandy computers to show
| them off. One in particular sticks out to me -- an animation of a
| 3.5" "modern" floppy going into a shirt pocket and then an
| attempt at a 5.25" which resulted in a torn pocket, showing off
| the superior portability of the new, smaller disks. Does anyone
| else remember this?
| mikewarot wrote:
| The tiny storage and slow access time/speed are not something
| I'll miss. What I do miss is the _security_ that they provided.
|
| The serenity of having known good backups, that just work, is
| something that nobody under 50 is likely to ever experience.
| Because we had the ability to copy and _write protect_ our
| software and data, we could easily make manage our security in a
| completely transparent manner.
|
| You could take your little case of floppy disks and have your
| work environment up and running on any IBM compatible in no time
| flat.
| outworlder wrote:
| > that just work
|
| Eh. The reliability wasn't really great. We never knew if our
| data was still there.
| SllX wrote:
| A few weeks ago I actually watched a video with this same
| gentleman. The video itself is from 6 years ago but it was
| insightful and some of you may prefer that medium.
|
| Link: https://youtu.be/z9tENHe19gk
| Animats wrote:
| A few years ago, the last man standing in the punched paper tape
| business, "westnc.com", finally gave it up. There were still some
| numerically controlled machine tools running off paper tape. In
| 2019, NSA punched a crypto key into paper tape for the last time.
| As far as I can tell, nobody in the US still sells punched paper
| tape.
|
| Although if you really need it, you could get it made. I restore
| old Teletype machines, including the kind that printed on 5/16"
| paper tape. I had a thousand rolls of such tape made up by a
| company in China, that being the minimum order, and I still sell
| some now and then to Teletype collectors.
| CliffStoll wrote:
| I've got a couple boxes of 80-column punch cards ...
| 83457 wrote:
| My mom has many boxes from her long career programming for
| mainframes. She uses them for todo lists... for herself now,
| not a computer.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Bar I worked at in the late 90s did all their checks and
| orders on these. Guy who worked there par tike worked
| dismantling mainframes and had tons of them. Cheaper than
| any other paper they could find.
| taftster wrote:
| Or maybe she is the computer now.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I found "NIUB" (New In Unopened Box) floppies at home: 5"1/4
| floppies, never used. I've got no idea: are they still as good as
| new even though they're something like 35 years old?
|
| I found more than that: I found my "time capsule" C128 (safely
| stored for 30 years+, still working, non polluted by anything
| modern). I found a "copier" software (Fast Hack'Em II IIRC) still
| working and managed to use it to copy a still working copy of
| Commando (chiptune sountrack by Rob Hubbard, the god of SID music
| back in the days).
|
| But I have no idea: are these NIUB floppies as good as new or do
| they decay as years passes by?
| themagician wrote:
| Completely depends on the make/model/manufacture date.
|
| Older floppies are actually much better made than newer ones.
| Disks from 1994 or earlier tend to be better than those made
| after.
|
| Many floppies are good for 30+ years.
| ck2 wrote:
| Anyone else old enough to remember the 8 inch floppies on TRS-80
| Model II?
|
| Heh how far we've come, it's incredible.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I was cleaning around a stack of DEC tapes at work a few weeks
| ago and found an 8 inch floppy. Having grown up with the 5 1/4"
| disks it was a bit surreal to hold the bigger one... almost
| felt like I'd shrunk a little!
| virgulino wrote:
| I remember laughing out loud the first time I handled an 8-inch
| floppy. The very definition of a FLOPPY disk. It was a little
| disturbing. I was already in the era of the 5.25" double-sided
| floppy back then.
| tgv wrote:
| How desirable they were! Our school had a few small TRS-80s
| (Level I) for the pupils in my last year, and one full blown
| one with the floppy drive, but that was only for the staff. We
| couldn't even afford floppies. How wonderful it all was. It
| exuded explorability, in contrast to modern phones and
| computers, which are very accessible, but don't let you feel
| what it's like to build something out of almost nothing. POKE-
| ing in memory to change something on screen feels more exciting
| than having huge frameworks with multiple inference engines
| available at your fingertips, if only you could manage to read
| the multi-megabyte documentation.
| jscipione wrote:
| No, I'm not old enough to remember 8" floppies but I watched
| Adrian's Digital Basement's repair of the TRS model-2 including
| restoring the 8" floppy drive, connecting it to 24V, using a
| adapter to hook it up to a PC to make a boot disk. [0]
| Unfortunately once Adrian got the Model-2 working and booted to
| TRS DOS he didn't test any other software on the machine. My
| experience with Tandy machines was playing Burger Time off a
| cartridge as a kid, no 8" floppies.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/TfEzjcG_0gs
| Tr3nton wrote:
| I fondly recall when my friend became the first kid in our
| neighborhood to get cable internet instead of dialup. I biked
| over to his house with a backpack full of 3.5" floppies and spent
| hours filling them up with games.
|
| It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone
| exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk; same for the
| total download size of a fairly barebones website. Nostalgia!
| timbit42 wrote:
| It will fit if you use a Sony Mavica with the floppy drive
| built in.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone
| exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk
|
| ... and the full decompressed version of that image might not
| have fit into your computer's memory at that time, either.
| outworlder wrote:
| For quite a while, floppy disks exceeded the system memory by
| at least one order of magnitude.
| robertq wrote:
| I have some old 5.25" floppies backed up with FastBack. If I can
| get the data transferred, anybody know how to decode the backup
| compression?
| romwell wrote:
| I'm still using floppy disks with my Yamaha PSR-630 workstation
| keyboard -- you can arrange an entire song on that machine in no
| time. Plenty of highly acclaimed vintage music equipment --
| notably, Ensonique samplers -- still use them too.
|
| I got the floppy disks for my machine from Microsoft's supply
| room when I was an intern there in 2014. At the time, there were
| still some niche uses for floppies in the Microsoft ecosystem
| (e.g., RAID drivers for Windows XP could _only_ be loaded from a
| floppy on install, IIRC), but that was on the way out too -- so I
| grabbed half a dozen disks from a pile.
|
| Remarkably, they are still perfectly usable.
|
| The major problem I have with them is that the floppy disk drive
| on the keyboard is slightly out of alignment. Which means that
| the only way to read the floopies is _to use that specific disk
| drive_.
|
| I've been meaning to replace the drive for years, but never
| really got to it. I've also considered swapping it out for an SD
| card reader/USB drive (ones meant to replace floppy drives are
| readily available), but where's the charm in that?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Pro tip: floppy disks are extremely useful to observe solar
| eclipses. Still keep a box with a few floppies in my desk for
| this very purpose.
| turtledragonfly wrote:
| Completely unrelated: I was impressed by this interview for being
| no-BS and interesting. It's such a rare occasion that I actually
| think to myself "ooh, I wonder if this site has more good
| articles like this."
|
| Never heard of Eye on Design before, but glad it's on my radar,
| now (:
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've used punch cards, paper tape, DECtapes, magtapes, cartridge
| tapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip disks,
| CDs, DVDs, and Bluray disks.
|
| I'm not nostalgic for any of them. Good riddance.
|
| Just yesterday, I was watching a new DVD movie. Fresh out of its
| wrapper, it stalled halfway through because the dvd is defective.
|
| Phooey on all of that. CRT monitors, too.
|
| Today I use terabyte drives, and have a box of USB sticks. For
| inexplicable reasons, the terabyte drives USB sticks have no way
| to write on them. So I stick an Avery label on them and write on
| that.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I'm nostalgic about them but I don't want to use them due to
| the lack of reliability. If they were reliable, I'd love to use
| them.
| Fileformat wrote:
| I've been collecting photos of them all:
|
| https://www.fileformat.info/media/a.htm
| WalterBright wrote:
| Nice to meet another data hoarder :-)
| timbit42 wrote:
| You need to add some mainframe and minicomputer media, like
| DECtape, etc.
| fbn79 wrote:
| There is a funny story that my Computer Science teacher used to
| tell. One day a friend called him saying his floppy drive was not
| working as expected. He went to check and found two floppy disk
| crushed inside the floppy drive. So my prof asked his friend why
| have pushed two floppy in the drive, broking everything. He
| answered: "computer said to insert disk 2, I have done something
| wrong?"
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| What was also funny was "floppy grammar" (at least in my time and
| locale)
|
| Whenever you gave someone x amount of floppies to copy something
| for you (prob a game)... the usual grammar/conversation was "you
| can just _copy over it_ " yet no such thing exists, you can't in
| 999/1000 cases "copy-over something" you first have to
| delete/format it _then_ copy.
|
| Always thought it was 'funny/weird' :)
| dEnigma wrote:
| The fact that this site keeps spawning eyes all over the place
| while you are inactive really creeped me out when I went back to
| the tab to continue reading after a while.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I found some floppy disks in my house from when I was a kid last
| year. I plugged them into a reader I had and they still worked. I
| didn't need them so I sold them on eBay and someone bought them
| and the reader.
| marban wrote:
| The medium I miss the most are Mini-Discs -- They really were the
| sweet-spot in combining digital (albeit lossy-ish) with a
| tactile, analog experience. The pinnacle of mixtapes.
| dehrmann wrote:
| What I really miss about them is the recording technology and
| case meant they're really good for long-term storage.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Stashed away somewhere, I still have a couple of 8" floppy disks.
| The only time I ever used them was for a CS class that, for
| whatever reason, used IBM 9000s [0] running Xenix for coursework,
| and they were difficult to find even in 1986-87. The one and only
| place that had any was, naturally, Radio Shack, and they were
| Tandy-branded, no doubt intended for the TRS-80 Model II.
| Assuming bitrot hasn't set in, they likely still have Xenix
| filesystems on them.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The first time I installed Linux was from 4 (yes really) 3.5"
| floppies.
| ryanmercer wrote:
| I've been buying from him for a decade plus for both my 8-bit
| Atari use and Win/DOS use, my last order was a couple of months
| ago - bought two of the used Dell drives and some more 3.5s from
| him.
| pan69 wrote:
| > How did your business initially come about? > > I started out
| as a tax lawyer in Washington, DC. I became involved with a
| software company in California that was doing unique tax
| calculations.
|
| Ah, right, "unique tax calculations". I guess thats one of
| describing it. :)
| eu wrote:
| I remember in college we were going back and forth between our
| dormitory and our computer lab with a bunch of FDs to copy the
| media files (mp3s and jpegs) we downloaded on the server
| overnight. Often one of the disk would have errors and had go
| back another time.
|
| A few years back, at $work we found some old FDs with some
| interesting labels on them: "survey data 199x". It turns out
| there were some binary files from an ancient stats program and I
| spent a few days figuring out how to extract the data. Fun times
| kingsloi wrote:
| I can't wait to bust out my collection of "PC Genius" floppy
| disks that I had growing up, and play them with my son in a few
| years. I haven't inserted a floppy disk in a reader in about
| 10-15 years, but secretly super excited to do it again!
| 101008 wrote:
| Floppy disks (or diskettes, as they are called in Spanish) were
| very important for my formation when I was a kid. I had a
| computer but I hadn't internet access at home (very expensive for
| my family), so I was going to the computer cafe two blocks away
| and I downloaded files into the diskette that then I was able to
| check at home. That's how I downloaded tutoriales (File > Save
| page as...) and a lot of stuff.
|
| Things became better when I had 2 or 3 diskettes and I was able
| to download bigger files using Hacha, a free software to split
| large files. Of course, nothing was worse than arriving home and
| one of them failing.
|
| As someone said in another comment, I miss the sound and the
| "physicality" of them. It reminds me of a time when you were
| offline by default, and you had to go online. Now it is, sadly,
| the other way around.
| lake_vincent wrote:
| I remember actually exchanging floppy disks containing images
| (made in Paint, of course) with my friends via _snail mail._ It
| was the original version of Snapchat. Horrible latency.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Were some of them also, hrm, _explicit_ in nature?
| lake_vincent wrote:
| Lol, no, I was way too young then! They were probably
| pictures of Power Rangers or Super Mario I drew, lmao.
|
| By the time I was of _that_ age, we had the wonders of dial
| up internet and semi-scrambled adult TV channels.
|
| :')
| snvzz wrote:
| Same story. I guess it's pretty common.
|
| What's odd is I used DD floppies, not HD floppies, because my
| only computer at home was an Amiga.
| icambron wrote:
| What a great interview! It's unusual that you read a business
| interview and find it this charming and interesting. I like the
| guy already.
| fortran77 wrote:
| A lot of musicians still use sequencers and synthesizers that
| save patches on floppies. (Over time people have been replacing
| them with floppy-to-usb-drive adapters)
| titoo22 wrote:
| golem14 wrote:
| I recently found an old backup 3.5" floppy from [?]1993 with some
| thesis material. I could read it without any problems on an old
| USB connected floppy drive (and as a bonus, compile the LaTeX
| with zero problems).
|
| I was a bit surprised and had expected a bit of work.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| How about a floppy to USB/flash/SSD adapter. Do we need to make
| the physical thing still?
| tpmx wrote:
| Earliest capture of this guy's original site:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19980623131044/http://www.diskdu...
|
| Earliest capture of his site on floppydisks.com:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20030330102403/http://floppydisk...
|
| Floppy duplication prices from these pages:
|
| June '98: $0.59 @ 500
|
| March '03: $0.39 @ 500
| biggc wrote:
| > These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get
| information in and out of a machine. Imagine it's 1990, and
| you're building a big industrial machine of one kind or another.
| You design it to last 50 years and you'd want to use the best
| technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy
| disk.
|
| This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware
| emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-drive with an
| IDE floppy drive interface. A quick Google search revealed that
| someone already builds this!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwL65rtjuBQ
| gattilorenz wrote:
| The most common/cheap solution is the Gotek floppy drive,
| easily found on Aliexpress or eBay, and with the FlashFloppy
| firmware [1] for expanding the capabilities of the hardware.
|
| Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no
| IDE floppy drives :)
|
| [1] https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
| toast0 wrote:
| > Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's
| no IDE floppy drives :)
|
| Well, LS-120 were available in ATAPI, which is at least IDE
| adjacent, if you don't want to call it IDE.
| acomjean wrote:
| There is the "Woz" file format for the apple2 (and others). It
| takes a disk image (flux?) and makes the file bootable in some
| emulators.
|
| https://applesaucefdc.com/woz/
|
| the images it creates are sometimes stunning and interesting
| depending on copy protection.
|
| https://archive.org/details/ApplesauceImages/Age%20of%20Adve...
| mprovost wrote:
| I worked for a network storage company that originally wanted
| to call themselves "Arraid" but discovered a small company
| already using that name, making replacement flash-based
| disk/floppy/tape drives for old mainframes and minis. Looks
| like they're still around in case you need something for your
| PDP-11!
|
| https://www.arraid.com/
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Yeah, this kind of thing is not exactly uncommon in the
| retrocomputing scene, though it's often an SD card rather than
| a USB drive.
| dleslie wrote:
| You can get floppy emulators on Amazon.
|
| https://www.amazon.ca/Emulator-SFR1M44-U100-Install-Industri...
| atourgates wrote:
| I think he might have figured out the secret to happiness:
|
| > "Me, I just like to get up in the morning, have people ask me
| questions, and try to solve problems. My business is a little bit
| of an adventure for me every day."
| doomlaser wrote:
| When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs
| introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a
| floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at
| the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own
| freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our
| software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for
| around 10 years, releasing games like Sloppy Sokoban, Pong Wars,
| and Descender.
|
| Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on
| to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world.
|
| Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those
| interested:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd...
| xeromal wrote:
| Thanks for sharing!
| dpedu wrote:
| Oh hey I remember playing Sloppy Sokoban.
| bartread wrote:
| > Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for
| those interested:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd...
|
| Blimey: the download page for Descender still works. I mean,
| I've downloaded it on Windows, so that's not going to end well,
| and I guess it won't actually run on my Mac because 32-bit, but
| I was pretty impressed that I could download it at all. Nice
| site as well: very nostalgic.
|
| On a more serious note, did you manage to make a living out of
| it and - either way - what made you stop?
| doomlaser wrote:
| Sales from Descender meant I didn't need to do other work
| during college (it plays perfectly fine in SheepShaver, if
| you'd like to give it a try), and it probably helped secure
| me an internship at Apple working on their internal game
| development team. I helped work on games for clickwheel
| iPods. Funnily, I'm one of the full motion video characters
| in Apple's _Texas Hold 'em_!
|
| In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I shifted to making
| original indie games for PC and launched
| http://doomlaser.com. In 2008, with the release of the iPhone
| SDK, it suddenly became very lucrative to know how to develop
| games for Apple devices, and I helped build out the Tap Tap
| Revenge series. My favorite thing I did for that was the
| final boss sequence for Justice's Phantom Pt. II in Tap Tap
| Dance. A friend and I modeled it after the Star Gate sequence
| in _2001: A Space Odyssey_
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s)
|
| Since then, I've gone back and forth between working on
| personal indie stuff and doing contract work or work in the
| industry. Helped build the game for The Hunger Games movie,
| worked on a crazy game for Adult Swim about men transforming
| into cars, helped build futuristic AR experiences for
| Niantic's in-house AR SDK, etc.
|
| I switched from building games in my own bespoke
| C++/Obj-C/OpenGL engines to Unity in 2013. The scene has
| changed a lot. In the 2007-2011 era, you could pretty much
| know everybody making cool indie game stuff across the entire
| world. It was a great time, and a great scene. We all met
| each other through the TIGSource forums and at events like
| GDC. It's a much, much larger world now, and thus, it's much
| harder to stand out. "indie games" as a search term peaked in
| 2013. But of course, I'm still making my own stuff and also
| curating cool unique indie game work I see at
| https://twitter.com/Doomlaser
|
| btw: complimentary serial for anyone who wants to give
| Descender a try, _Name:_ test _Registration #:_
| SDSKSER000-5RF7-068A-7C8F-49D3-4034
| bartread wrote:
| Thanks for the detailed response, and glad it worked out
| for you - that's awesome. Tap Tap passed me by just because
| I didn't have a decent smartphone back then but looks like
| loads of fun (and I _love_ Justice). Sounds like good
| times! Thanks for the serial - I 'll give Descender a try
| with SheepShaver and see how I get on.
| rajlego wrote:
| Wow, haven't thought about tap tap revenge in a long time
| but loved it as a kid. Thanks for your work!
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not
| have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi
| blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.
| bombcar wrote:
| People talk about how the iMac drove the USB market, which it
| did (how many PCs were seen with "iMac looking" USB devices
| for a decade afterwards), but the real thing I feel it drove
| was using the Internet as a main _file_ transport.
|
| Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other
| tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds.
|
| Now most people needing to transfer a file to another
| computer in their house will upload it to some server
| thousands of miles away as it's "easiest".
| hinkley wrote:
| They weren't the first with gigabit Ethernet in a laptop as
| I recall, but they were fairly early, and that made a huge
| difference.
|
| Having a decent router available also helped. I'm still
| pretty miffed at whoever axed the Airport group. I kept
| expecting it to come back. Or for the apple TV to sprout
| router functionality. Something.
| wazoox wrote:
| The Mac G4 was the first desktop computer with gigabit
| ethernet as a standard. It was still pretty rare back
| then, even on servers and workstations.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as
| a main file transport.
|
| I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out
| in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new
| at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to
| the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially
| nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email
| messages was technically possible, the combination of slow
| Internet connections and small mailbox size limits (often
| as small as a few megabytes) made this impractical for most
| users.
|
| No -- what the removal of the floppy disk drive from the
| iMac primarily drove was the use of other removable
| storage, like Zip media and USB flash drives. It wouldn't
| be until considerably later that casually transferring
| files over the Internet would become feasible.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I remember, in 1999, my friends using a website called
| imacfloppy.com to transfer files to themselves via the
| internet. I suppose it was the dropbox of the day.
| bombcar wrote:
| From my group I was one of _two_ people who had a Zip
| drive (the other guy had a Jazz(tm) drive too) and we
| usually dragged the parallel port drive along with the
| discs.
|
| But that was just when things like IRC fileservs and
| Napster (1999) started to take off which was the main
| medium of "file sharing" at that point (for local
| transfers networking gear had dropped significantly, the
| iMac had ethernet built in, everyone had some sort of
| yumcha network setup - often sharing that 56k connection.
| 56kbps is 18 gigabytes a month, and the proliferation of
| "unlimited" internet was right around that time.
|
| The final nail in the coffin was _affordable_ CD-Rs. Once
| those started to proliferate (rip mix burn) you finally
| had _disposable_ removable storage you could give people.
| Floppies were that, but zip and USB were not.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| That's my recollection as well. I was in college around
| that time and my primary way of saving data to move
| between computers was a Zip drive disk (since all the
| computers in the labs had one), then a USB flash drive
| with maybe 32MB of space (worked fine when moving files
| between Macs - I don't think the PCs had USB ports at the
| time).
|
| "Cloud storage" was definitely not a common thing at the
| time.
| tssva wrote:
| The PC I purchased in late 1996 had USB 1.0 ports. USB
| 1.1 came out in 1998 around the same time as the iMac.
| The new PC I bought in fall 1998 had USB 1.1 ports. Most
| new PCs at that time were coming with USB ports. Maybe
| your school just had older PCs.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Schools have never been known for keeping up with the
| latest in computing hardware. The 90s were no exception.
|
| Besides -- early on, a lot of PC makers put USB ports on
| the back of the computer, since that's where all the
| other ports were. It took some time for PC makers to
| realize that USB ports weren't just for permanently
| installed equipment like printers or modems, and to start
| redesigning cases or using drive bay breakouts to make
| the ports more accessible.
| derefr wrote:
| Depends on the use-case.
|
| You're probably thinking of home use (where, if you're
| buying a Mac, you're probably also thinking ahead and
| investing into something to move its files around); or
| maybe university lab use.
|
| I bet the GP, meanwhile, is thinking about (pre-
| university) educational use-cases. Public-school computer
| labs were a big part of Apple's market share from the
| late '80s until the early '00s.
|
| When I was small (late '80s), we had a single Apple II
| per classroom. Those machines has no networking _or_
| storage, other than the 5.25 " drive. Usually we weren't
| saving anything, just using stateless educational
| software/games; but every once in a while, we'd all be
| run through some program, which would save our work to a
| single shared classroom "state" floppy.
|
| Later, we had computer labs full of Macs (Color Classic
| IIs, if I recall), but still no computer _network_ -- nor
| assigned seating in the lab -- so saving data on the lab
| computers themselves was pointless /untenable. Instead,
| we were expected to bring a 3.5" floppy disk to school
| with us to save our work on. It was a school supply!
|
| And that's basically how computing in schools continued
| to work, riiiiight up until the iMac era. Which is both
| when there began to be no _economical_ data storage
| medium you could expect every five-year-old 's parents to
| easily purchase as a school supply (flash drives were
| "pay a premium for portability" products in 1998, not the
| commodities they are now); and also when computer local-
| networking stacks began to really be standardized (no
| more AppleTalk, only Ethernet), lowering the barriers to
| schools building IT competence, and so enabling even
| elementary schools to start setting up computer networks,
| with user directories, roaming user accounts, and central
| file storage.
|
| But despite now having a place to save things _at school_
| that didn 't require any disks, you were suddenly put in
| a tough spot if you wanted to bring work home with you.
| If you weren't one of the rich kids with a USB stick,
| then email was pretty much the only solution! (Not
| necessarily actually _sending_ email; I recall people
| opening webmail, attaching documents, and then saving the
| message as a Draft.)
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah, the _disposable_ nature of floppies was key; sure
| they were small, but if you lost one you didn 't cry all
| night (unless it had your only copy of your thesis on
| it).
|
| That wasn't really solved until the era of the
| "affordable" CD burner, so there was a moderately painful
| 1998-2001 or so era where you had to do some tricks often
| or trust someone with a relatively expensive piece of
| equipment.
|
| Even in 2000 a burner was around $250 or more, but
| spending $15 or whatever on a ZIP disk was painful even
| then, if you weren't sure you'd get it back.
| duxup wrote:
| Not quite the same but I hated the removal of the headphone
| jack.
|
| I now own mostly Bluetooth headphones and use an adapter in
| the rare cases otherwise, I generally don't even notice that
| it isn't there.
| NavinF wrote:
| Latency still sucks on non-Apple Bluetooth headphones
| hinkley wrote:
| I only recently discovered why bluetooth isn't a
| particularly good option. I'd paired my good headphones
| with my phone, but all of a sudden wanted headphones for
| other devices, and having one set of earphones paired with
| multiple devices is a deeply flawed experience. First, you
| can only connect to one or two, second, mine kept telling
| me it was disconnecting and reconnecting to the other
| device while I was walking around listening to audio. That
| is extremely distracting.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I have my AirPods and my Beats Flex (better for
| traveling, if they fall out, they just end up around my
| neck) "paired" to six devices. If the auto switching is a
| problem, you can disable it and still have your AirPods
| paired to multiple devices
| taftster wrote:
| I still hate the removal of the headphone jack. Bluetooth
| is overrated.
| romwell wrote:
| My Samsung Galaxy A22 has headphone jack (which gets used
| all the time), dual SIM, dedicated SD card slot, NFC, all
| day battery, and 5G support.
|
| It came out this year -- there are plenty of sane
| manufacturers releasing phones with features that people
| want out there.
|
| Use cases for 3.5mm jack that Bluetooth can't handle:
|
| * Never having to worry about headphones running out of
| charge
|
| * Zero added latency - critical for music making apps
| (somewhat remediated with latest BT versions, but good
| luck finding latency specs on the box)
|
| * Switching between devices instantly (work/personal
| laptop and phone) - especially not fun if you use more
| than 2 of them
|
| The last issue is especially annoying. It's 2022, I
| should be able to pair my headphones _instantly_ by
| tapping them to the device I want to pair them to,
| without screens and buttons. Accelerometers exist.
| Proximity sensors exist.
|
| But noooo, apparently, UX is not a consideration in the
| design of this godforesaken protocol.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If you have an Android device as a "music making" device,
| you have much larger problems than BT.
|
| It's better. But still not great.
|
| https://9to5google.com/2021/03/05/google-android-audio-
| laten...
| gambiting wrote:
| The worst thing about it is that I now have to carry 3
| pairs of shitty Bluetooth headphones instead of one good
| pair because switching connected devices is such a pain
| that this is literally much easier to live with. I hate
| it. Bring the headphone jack back.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| AirPods solved this for me. I'm not sure exactly what
| apple did that is different from the regular bluetooth
| audio spec, but the seemless integration and transition
| between devices is fantastic
| 14 wrote:
| Is that just Apple devices or can you connect to non
| Apple products with AirPods as well?
| geenew wrote:
| Linux, windows, Mac all work. The mic works too (on
| windows at least), so they make a good backup if you
| don't have a headset for a teams/etc call.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Do note that using the microphone will degrade the
| playback and recording quality to rotary-phone-levels.
| For the sake of everyone in your Zoom call: please buy a
| $50 wired microphone if you're going to spend $150 on
| Airpods.
| geenew wrote:
| I did not know that, I'll have to check next time it
| comes up. To be clear, I use them as a backup, like when
| I'm traveling and didn't bring my normal headset.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's specifically only an issue when your Airpods are
| being used for playback _and_ recording. If you 're
| simply listening to the meeting on your Airpods and using
| your Macbook microphone, you probably won't notice. Most
| people don't seem to set that up though, which leads to
| the cellphone-quality audio that people associate with
| wireless earbuds.
| scarface74 wrote:
| That's not a problem with AirPods. You pair them with one
| device and they are automatically paired with all of your
| devices and auto switch
| romwell wrote:
| >That's not a problem with AirPods. You pair them with
| one device and they are automatically paired with all of
| your devices and auto switch
|
| And how do AirPods know whether I want to use them to
| take a conference call on my work laptop, listen to a
| YouTube video on the personal laptop, or watch a quick
| video my friend sent me on WhatsApp on my phone?
|
| Do they have telepathic powers that I don't know of?
|
| Oh, and will they prioritize the work phone call over an
| incoming call on my personal phone too, unless it's
| something really important?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Simple, if I am listening to a podcast and then I take a
| conference call on my computer, they automatically
| switch. If I am watching something on my iPad, and I
| answer a call on my iPhone, they automatically switch.
|
| If I'm actively playing a video or listening to audio on
| my Mac, my iPhone, or my iPad and I put my AirPods in my
| ear, sound is automatically rerouted to my AirPods from
| the device.
|
| If I'm watching a video on my iPad and then I click on a
| video on my iPhone, they switch.
|
| My AppleTVs don't automatically switch. An AppleTV is a
| shared experience most of the time.
|
| But even if you turn automatic switching off, I still
| don't have to pair my AirPods with my iPhone, iPad,
| Watch, two AppleTVs and my Mac individually. I can just
| click a drop down and they automatically show up on each
| device or any new device I use with my AppleID.
| Shorel wrote:
| My Xiaomi Red Mi Pro has a headphone jack.
|
| It is one of the reasons I got it.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| As simple as hitting a button on any decent BT headset.
| gambiting wrote:
| In all the pairs I own it's some arcane combination to
| enter pairing mode, and then have you tried adding BT
| headphones to windows when the same ones were paired in
| the past? You have to remove them first then go back into
| pairing mode again. It's more bullshit than I'm willing
| to deal with. With a jack you plug them in and they work.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| You don't have to enter pairing mode if the device
| remembers previous pairings, which is not that strange.
| romwell wrote:
| Work phone, personal phone, work laptop, personal laptop,
| tablet, desktop.
|
| Good luck pressing that button five dozen times to take
| the call on your work phone after using them with your
| desktop, only to find out that your glorious BT device
| only has 4 memory slots like a videogame from 1991, and
| unlinked your work phone when you used them with your
| tablet.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| agreed. until bluetooth earphone batteries can go for a
| few days between recharging, and can quick charge in,
| say, 15 min or so, I'll keep my wired. I also have AirPod
| Pros, but I keep my Bose qc20 around and still find
| myself using them multiple times per month when the APP
| go low (never get more than around 3 hrs from them).
| tjr wrote:
| https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21
| gibspaulding wrote:
| I love that the top comment on this (from 9 years ago) is
| complaining about the new macbook air not having a CD
| drive.
| ido wrote:
| At least of the 3 examples on that webpage it seems like you
| made remakes of existing simple games (tetris, sokoban, pong) -
| did you try making new designs of your own and if not, why not?
| doomlaser wrote:
| Sure. In 2007 I started up a new label at
| http://doomlaser.com. Made a bunch of indie stuff as that
| scene was really starting to bloom. Helped build some big
| franchises like Tap Tap Revenge, the iOS game for The Hunger
| Games, alongside irreverent stuff like
| https://kotaku.com/ultimate-shovelware-shit-game-5032364, and
| personal stuff like https://doomlaser.itch.io/standardbits (a
| game named after the Mac's low-level graphics blitter). Still
| working in games to this day.
| protonbob wrote:
| I just want to say that tap tap revenge was my favorite
| game as a kid and I have very fond memories of doing 2
| player on the same ipod touch. "Gotta get the high score"
| The_SamminAter wrote:
| Oh damn, I used to love Tap Tap Revenge. In fact, I still
| keep an old iPhone around to play it and a few other games
| from back then.
| titoo22 wrote:
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| From the first sentence of TFA:
|
| > Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed "last man standing in the
| floppy disk business."
|
| Why editorialize they HN title? He's a guy! And "last man
| standing" is a set phrase. "Last person standing" is not.
| brunoTbear wrote:
| Editorialization serves a valuable role of making writing
| better. IMO, language that is more inclusive is better than
| language that is less inclusive. Keeping needlessly gendered
| phrases around simply because they're a "set phrase" doesn't
| serve any compelling interest.
|
| Language evolves. You can fight the ocean with a rake, or you
| can be supportive of changes that make language better for your
| friends and neighbors.
| jimmy-axod wrote:
| > IMO, language that is more inclusive is better than
| language that is less inclusive.
|
| Why say person then? Are you anti-other mammals? Not very
| inclusive is it!
|
| 'more inclusive' is not always better, because it's less
| specific and less exact.
| samatman wrote:
| There is nothing generic in the sentence "last man standing".
| It's referring to one person, who is, in this case, a man.
|
| The argument, which at least makes sense, is that a
| "Chairman", even if he's male, should be a "Chairperson"
| because the office is not male, and therefore the title
| shouldn't be gendered.
|
| That just doesn't apply here. "A Chairperson" makes sense, "a
| last man standing" doesn't.
|
| "Last person standing" is also something you could say, but
| the title didn't, and there is no cause to 'correct' it,
| because it isn't wrong.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I have no problem with calling a waitress a server or
| whatever, but when I clicked on this title I did spend some
| time thinking about the lost euphoniousness and wondering
| whether there is a special masculine quality to "last man
| standing". It sounds like it might come from some knockdown
| game that women would not play. Google says boxing.
| chernevik wrote:
| Language has idioms and phrases, and over time these connect
| generations.
| romwell wrote:
| >"Last person standing" is not.
|
| _Was_ not.
|
| I had no problem reading the title, and didn't even notice
| anything unusual about it until reading this comment.
|
| Language changes. Complaining about it won't change it back.
| jlarcombe wrote:
| About five or six years ago there was a single packet of 5.25
| inch floppy discs for sale in the window of a strange shop near
| my office in London.
|
| It was one of those weird shops that never seemed to actually
| open or have anyone come through the door. The rest of the stock
| seemed to be travel clocks and things like those waving cats. I
| think it was mainly a wholesale business but nothing ever seemed
| to come in or go out.
|
| I walked past the shop every lunchtime and grew increasingly
| obsessed with this box of discs, the first I'd seen for sale for
| maybe twenty years. Where had it come from? Why was it in the
| window? Who was going to buy it?
|
| Eventually I decided that I'd have to buy them myself, just so I
| could stop thinking about it.
|
| But the next time I walked past the shop, the discs were gone!
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Strange Stories fodder
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| oh sure, The Shop in Go By Street
| http://fullonlinebook.com/poems/a-shop-in-go-by-street/ftpz....
| saruken wrote:
| Funny, I did the same thing with a 5-pack of Zip disks a couple
| years ago. I ended up buying them though, for a couple bucks.
| Who else would have? I still have them sitting on my desk, keep
| telling myself I'll finish rebuilding the old tower PC I picked
| up at a thrift store, and I'll buy a Zip drive for it.
|
| I used to have a Zip drive in my PC in high school -- I
| remember saving 3ds Max files to it when I was first learning
| to model. And _Deadlock_ , a turn-based strategy game that came
| with some version of Windows, I copied it onto a Zip disk and
| distributed it to some friends. But as I remember they were too
| busy with _Kingdom Under Fire_ and _Brood War_.
| titoo22 wrote:
| causi wrote:
| _Nothing_ in modern computing compares to the audible and
| kinesthetic satisfaction of the _ka-chunk_ of a 3.5 inch floppy
| being inserted into a drive.
| acheron wrote:
| I've thought the same thing about those big power switches on
| AT and older motherboards/power supplies where you actually
| shut the power off.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The 5 1/4 disks, IMO, had a superior kinesthetic. A much more
| solid thunk sound when being inserted and a deeper tone while
| being read.
|
| Enjoy, the sounds of floppies :D [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8
| p1mrx wrote:
| The seeking at 1:48[1] sounds like Hall and Oates[2].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8&t=108s
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY27wmTZwyg
| linker3000 wrote:
| The 8 inchers were a nightmre in some mechanisms (whichever
| ones Intel used in their MDS systems); slide 'em in too
| quickly and with a bit of passion (!?) and they'd catch on
| something, so if you weren't paying attention you'd fold them
| over and make a crease. Bye bye data!
| raintrees wrote:
| Ah, but 8" floppies made better frisbees - personal
| experience :)
|
| I used to work in the disk duplication industry, both at a
| copier (DisCopyLabs) and then later at the robot
| manufacturer, Mountain Computer, which was eventually bought
| by Nakamichi and combined with Trace, our competitor.
|
| We used to be able to sail those suckers over the building on
| Wyatt Drive to the San Thomas Expressway... Next person to
| work on roof equipment probably had a curious experience,
| many discs that did not make it all the way likely scattered
| all over the roof.
| Koshkin wrote:
| The ones that I remember had a locking lever which barely
| made any sound at all.
|
| https://i.stack.imgur.com/8D9f1.jpg
| grishka wrote:
| Modern computers are so silent that you have no idea whether
| they're working hard or it's just someone doing things on the
| UI thread that don't belong there.
| blamarvt wrote:
| And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic
| sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| That 'stutter-of-failure' :D
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Especially post-pandemic when most of the stuff in the
| theater is dead and there's only a single backup of the
| lighting board programming on a 3.5" floppy with a broken
| dust protector. Manually spinning it and blowing the dust out
| brought it back enough to save it after our first improv jam
| that took place with fluorescents on for the first 15 minutes
| while I manually programmed a single wash on a dimmer.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, that, "Any second it will give up and shoot the disk
| back out" thought.
| Centmo wrote:
| Especially when you're on floppy #25 of OS/2 Warp.
| forinti wrote:
| A friend of mine had his first job installing Oracle from
| floppies. I'm not sure what the actual count was, but we
| would joke about him installing disk 1 of 99...
| bluedino wrote:
| First job I had was installing SCO off tapes and that was
| the year 2000
| stordoff wrote:
| I recall installing Office from ~35 floppy discs, and
| finding that one of the discs in the 20s was unreadable
| after what felt like an eternity. The installation still
| completed after I skipped it though, so presumably it only
| contained some optional feature I never ended up using.
| dugmartin wrote:
| Thanks, that brought back a vivid memory I didn't even know
| was still knocking around my brain!
| noizejoy wrote:
| Or floppy #10 of Mark of the Unicorn's DAW.
|
| Nervous times they were!
| thesuitonym wrote:
| tik tik tik tik tik
| deltarholamda wrote:
| This, and the click of death coming from a Zip disk that
| meant 100MB of Something Important had just entered Valhalla.
| gildas wrote:
| At that moment, I took the knife next to the computer to
| insert gently the blade into the drive above the diskette. It
| worked most of the time :p.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Glad to hear I'm not the only one who routinely stabbed my
| computer! I used to keep a butter knife by my iMac to help
| eject CDs. I had the first slot-loading model and the
| rubber eject rollers they used seemed to lose their grip
| after a while.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Once my family drove to visit my cousins. I brought a newly
| bought box of floppies just in case they had some interesting
| things to copy from... and forgot it in the car with summer
| heatwave outside. It was a very painful lesson, so many
| badblocks.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I didn't know the temperature mattered?
|
| Otherwise with new floppies I always reformatted and
| checked for bad blocks first. Some of the series were very
| bad quality.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| nah, some just melted. It was on the front seat with no
| shadow in Israeli +40C degrees heat.
| flotzam wrote:
| ddrescue trying to read a scratched DVD from a public library
| comes close. Horrifying sounds as you contemplate your drive
| wearing itself down, copy progress ETA 47:32:13
| amatecha wrote:
| The secret for scratched CDs/DVDs I learned way too late in
| the game was that you can actually polish the clear plastic
| underside with Brasso (brass polish) and a lens cloth. I
| restored sooo many optical discs this way. It really works!
| nine_k wrote:
| The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on
| your disk, you may as well have zero copies.
|
| It became more pronounced in late 1990s when disks became
| more ubiquitous and the race for the lower price likely made
| them less reliable.
|
| After that the idea of backing things up, no matter where
| they are recorded initially, feels very natural.
| vardump wrote:
| > The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data
| on your disk, you may as well have zero copies.
|
| Still true.
| daveslash wrote:
| Along similar lines: If you haven't tested or dry-run
| your restore procedures, you may as well not have backups
| either.
|
| That applies more for things like SQL databases and the
| like, more than personal files on disk. But yeah.... if
| you haven't tried to restore your database or other data
| repository from a backup file that you've squirreled
| away, then you effectively don't have a backup either.
| noizejoy wrote:
| I'd slightly amend the analogy into "an untested backup
| is akin to having a lottery ticket for your backups".
| Maybe you win or maybe you don't.
|
| Old floppies are also like lottery tickets in that sense.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| That's still the wisdom.
|
| The 3-2-1 backup rule: keep at least 3 copies of your data
| on at least 2 storage media, and keep at least 1 copy
| offsite.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible...
|
| Ahem, cough, dial-up modem handshake.
|
| That is all I have to say on the subject.
| martopix wrote:
| > In _modern_ computing
| stinkytaco wrote:
| Surely the floppy disk is not more modern than the modem?
| They started to die around the same time, if I recall.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Agreed, I remember dial up using an AOL CD. And CDR was
| around the corner.
| linker3000 wrote:
| Bah - font kerning issue (keeming).
| bornfreddy wrote:
| How about the constant fan noise when having ESET [0]
| installed on a Windows laptop then?
|
| [0] if you don't have ESET at hand, I guess any "good"
| antivirus would do.
| [deleted]
| phoboslab wrote:
| True. I'd put it on the same level as connecting XLR cables.
| MiniDiscs (and to a lesser extent) UMDs were maybe the last
| examples of such satisfying mechanics.
|
| We are moving towards a solid state future where no user
| interaction directly drives mechanics. Physical media has
| largely disappeared, few cars are sold with a manual
| transmission and everything is wireless.
|
| Maybe folding phones will fill the gap. For now, at least my
| toaster remains!
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Maybe the pinging of a modem? You can tell from the tune how
| well it is doing!
| wintorez wrote:
| Not even a modem handshake noise?
| rightbyte wrote:
| I wish my wifi had those. So I could know instantly if the
| connection is going to work or if I need to change spot.
| bbarnett wrote:
| For a second, I read 'wife' not 'wifi', and thought it was
| a lead in to marital harmony(or not).
| daveslash wrote:
| I also really liked the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of
| the 5.25 floppies.
| zoobab wrote:
| Splitting Big files with ARJ, recycling floppers from the
| magazines, downloading files over 56k computer room at school,
| putting them floppies, going back home to find out one is
| defect... That's how i installed my first Linux without any
| internet connection at home, a 6 months job!
| bornfreddy wrote:
| ARJ... Now that is a blast from the past! Thank you. :)
| tssva wrote:
| My local computer store sells 3.5 and 5.25 floppies. You can find
| them at the rear of the left side of the store on a shelf just
| above the one with the new in wrapper Zip disks.
| iamandras wrote:
| I enjoyed reading this article. It's amazing to think about the
| number of machines in the industry that need on floppy disks :)
| weinzierl wrote:
| The money quote from the article - and it is so well put - is :
|
| _" Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down.
| However, the number of people who provided the product went down
| even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there
| is a growing market share for the last man standing in the
| business, and that man is me."_
|
| My floppy story is: In the late 90s 3.5" floppies were ubiquitous
| and the Zip disk was the new kid on the block. 5.25" was a thing
| of the past and I'd never ever seen a 8" floppy and I did not
| expect to see one either.
|
| This was until I interned at a Siemens research lab where they
| still had 8" floppies. Why? Because the room-sized, several
| floors below ground housed electron microscopes used them.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised he doesn't deal in Zip drive disks as well.
| przefur wrote:
| As a person born in '95 I still remember floppy disks, it was
| probably the very first 'computer' thing that I've broken.
|
| Heck, I still should have a pile of those stashed in the
| basement, maybe it's a good time to plug the reader to my PC, and
| dig through those?
|
| This article was really well written, good reading!
| mikefivedeuce wrote:
| I still have some old hypercard stacks on floppy from third grade
| that I can't bear to throw away. Every time I come across the
| disks I remember how awesome it was to fire up the IIGS in
| computer lab and create the dumbest animations.
| navbaker wrote:
| We had an information system that we used in the 2008-2011
| timeframe on our military deployments that only used 3.5"
| floppies for data offload. Since we wrote our enormously long
| post-mission reports during each actual mission and had no desire
| to spend hours following the mission re-writing them from
| scratch, the week prior to deployment was always filled with
| folks fanning out to every office supply store we could find in a
| desperate search for any remaining boxes of disks so we had a
| sufficient stock to use 2-3 disks per mission and allow for the
| inevitable disk failures/attrition. It was tough finding them
| then, can't imagine trying to find them now!
| tpl wrote:
| Very happy to have not had to deal with a floppy that was done
| being able to be read in a very long time. I used to work at a
| campus computer lab and we would experience failures commonly
| while imaging machines. I do miss floppys but I am happy to see
| the extent that they are no longer critical.
| somat wrote:
| Sometimes there are people that appear confused why you would do
| something yourself. "Just buy it" or "just use the cloud
| service". I think this quote sums up the situation perfectly.
|
| ''' At one point we did a gigantic deal with a US payroll company
| for which we needed to copy hundreds of thousands of disks. We
| sent the work out to a third party who did the duplication for
| us. That was okay, but expensive, and it took a lot of time. The
| quality also wasn't quite what we wanted it to be. So the next
| time we decided to do the floppy duplication in-house and we got
| our own equipment. '''
| reiichiroh wrote:
| None of the disks he sells are the 5.25" floppy ones.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| In the article he says he has all manor of disks available if
| you contact them.
| sunnytimes wrote:
| I work in the mentioned embroidery business and we have a decent
| collection of floppy disks and gear. roughly 300 disks with 40 in
| circulation being used. about 20 USB floppy drives for PC's and
| new machines to use disks still. its a handy medium for us. I
| have one of the local e-waste places collecting anything they get
| disk related for me , lot of cases which is ok , gotta keep the
| dust off of the disks so everyone's desk has one now .. we can
| switch to USB and we do use USB as well so its not like the end
| of the world when they finally go.
| throwaway12305 wrote:
| At a previous job, I worked at a textbook wholesaler. The
| industry overall is dying. They were a small player, but they
| were _outrageously_ profitable. They realize that the good times
| won 't last and they'll never grow into a billion dollar company,
| but the party isn't over yet.
|
| Sometimes it's better to be the last person selling stage coaches
| than the tenth person selling cars.
| manholio wrote:
| In the money quote, he puts it quite eloquently:
|
| _Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down.
| However, the number of people who provided the product went
| down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that
| there is a growing market share for the last man standing in
| the business, and that man is me._
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| 11 years old me was afraid about putting some liquid paper on a
| floppy disk label to write my name could damage the computer.
| bombcar wrote:
| At a similar age I did a "science project" to see if the big
| floppies or the small one were better at reading data after
| being stuck to a fridge with a magnet for a month, and similar
| with sticking them in a freezer.
|
| Every single disk had zero errors.
| bragr wrote:
| You need a moving magnetic field to destroy the data unless
| you have a very very strong magnetic.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yep, and temperature doesn't really have an effect on
| magnets (perhaps at very low or when the disk melts).
|
| I do recall that most of the teachers and students thought
| it was "most surprising outcome" or something like that,
| from years of "if you put a magnet near your computer or
| disk it will eat the world" propaganda.
| rcarmo wrote:
| "Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than
| 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the
| avionics."
|
| Well, I hope they don't run out of space, or have a bad sector...
| Apocryphon wrote:
| What coincidence, I just found some old floppy disks of mine, and
| bought a vintage HP drive as per this guide to connect to my
| modern machines. Hopefully it works:
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/669331/how-to-read-a-floppy-disk-o...
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I've read this here before, but will regurgitate it.
|
| It's amazing that many software products still use the disc icon
| to represent saving. Many folks using computers now have never
| even seen one in person. To them it's the save icon, not a disc.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| He says "recycle". Does that mean he disposes of them in a
| responsible manner. or that he resells them as "nearly new"?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| One pretty amazing thing about floppy disks is that powerful
| full-featured software was written so efficiently so as to fit on
| them. WordStar fit on a single side of a 5.25" Floppy, IIRC Lotus
| 1-2-3 did as well.
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