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The last person standing in the floppy disk business

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Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#61

Post by ido »

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…

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?

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#62

Post by tgv »

roelschroeven wrote: post #59
seanc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true! Floppies had viruses too. Even back in the 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus)

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…

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).

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#63

Post by blantonl »

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.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#64

Post by xeromal »

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…

Thanks for sharing!

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#65

Post by vardump »

nine_k wrote: post #14
blamarvt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> 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.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#66

Post by seanc »

roelschroeven wrote: post #59
seanc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true! Floppies had viruses too. Even back in the 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus)

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…

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.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#67

Post by system2 »

blantonl wrote: post #63

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.

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.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#68

Post by ok123456 »

myth_drannon wrote: post #40
JKCalhoun wrote: post #31

> 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 ca…

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.

What's the book?

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#69

Post by fbn79 »

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?"

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#70

Post by phpisthebest »

blantonl wrote: post #63

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.

Windows 10 Floppy Install...

Please Insert Disk 1 of 4166

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