Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The last person standing in the floppy disk business

eyeondesign.aiga.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 363 posts

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#21

Post by eu »

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

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#24

Post by navbaker »

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!

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#26

Post by throwaway12305 »

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.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#27

Post by bombcar »

bragr wrote: post #20
bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need a moving magnetic field to destroy the data unless you have a very very strong magnetic.

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.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#28

Post by flotzam »

blamarvt wrote: post #10
causi wrote: post #5

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.

And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.

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

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#29

Post by tjr »

NoGravitas wrote: post #6
doomlaser wrote: post #4

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 S…

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.

https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#30

Post by asciimov »

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.

Post reply on HN